Museo Balear de Ciencias Naturales

Description

The Museu Balear de Ciènces Naturals is a municipal museum of natural history negotiated by a homonymous Association by means of an administration agreement. It is governed by a government's board in which there are a representative of the city council, a representative of the Association, the director of the museum and a civil servant that acts as secretary. All the activities of the museum (public, scientific, educational and of conservation) depend on the Association and they are channeled through the address of the museum. The physical headquarters is a small building of the first Twentieth located in the same place of the Botanical Garden of Sóller (Majorca). The Museum has 3 floors with four small exhibition rooms (two permanent exhibitions: history of the natural sciences and paleontology), a library, a room of acts for 30 people, a classroom of nature for school activities, warehouses and three rooms dedicated to laboratory-cabinet, besides some annexed spaces. The main objectives of the Museum are: the spreading and the environmental education, about the natural values of the Balearic Islands through conferences, seminars, exhibitions, congresses, informative sessions, courses, etc.; the scientific studies about the fauna, flora and geology from Balearic Islands and the conservation of collections of natural history (collections of fossils, microfossils, rocks, mushrooms, crustaceans and insects) some of them of municipal property and others deposited in the museum by particulars or generated by the scientific activity of the Association. The associates and collaborators of the departments of the Museum carry out studies on the fauna, flora and geology of Balearic Islands, especially in the district of the Sierra of Tramuntana. In these moments, there are work lines in the entomology (Coleoptera, Chrisomelida), Crustacean decapodes and terrestrial Isopoda, mycology (cataloguing of the micological flora of the Balearic Islands), speleology and sciences of karst (datación of phreatic speleothemes, studies about the exokarstical morphology of the Sierra of Tramuntana in Majorca, ecological and biological aspects of the caves of the Islands, among other) and the regional geology. The results are published periodically in specialized magazines.