MNHN) is the national natural history museum of France and a grand établissement of higher education part of Sorbonne University.

The main museum, with four galleries, is located in Paris, France, within the Jardin des Plantes on the left bank of the River Seine.

Besides growing and studying plants useful for health, the royal garden offered public lectures on botany, chemistry, and comparative anatomy.

In 1729, the chateau in the garden was enlarged with an upper floor, and transformed into the cabinet of natural history, designed for the royal collections of zoology and mineralogy.

A series of greenhouses were constructed on the west side of the garden, to study the plants and animals collected by French explorers for their for medical and commercial uses.

In his books, he challenged the traditional religious ideas that nature had not changed since the creation; he suggested that the earth was seventy-five thousand years old, divided into seven periods, with man arriving in the most recent.

Some of its early professors included eminent comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier and the pioneers of the theory of evolution, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

The naturalist Louis Jean Marie Daubenton wrote extensively about biology for the pioneer French Encyclopédie, and gave his name to several newly discovered species.

Major figures in the museum included Déodat de Dolomieu, who gave his name to the mineral dolomite and to a volcano on Reunion island, and the botanist Rene Desfontaines, who spent two years collecting plants for study Tunisia and Algeria, and whose book "Flora Atlantica" (1798–1799, 2 vols), added three hundred genera new to science.

[7] When Napoleon Bonaparte launched his military campaign to conquer Egypt in 1798, his army was accompanied by more than 154 scientists, including botanists, chemists, mineralogists, including Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Vivant Denon, Joseph Fourier, and Claude Louis Berthollet, who together took back a large quantity of specimens and illustrations to enrich the collections of the museum.

[8] The museum continued to flourish during the 19th century, particularly under the direction of chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, His research with animal fats[9] revolutionized the manufacture of soap and of candles and led to his isolation of the heptadecanoic (margaric), stearic, and oleic fatty acids.

In 1934, the museum opened the Paris Zoological Park, a new zoo to in the Bois de Vincennes, as the home for the larger animals of the Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes.

It was never fully completed in its original design; it never received the neoclassical entrance planned for the side of the building away from the garden, facing Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire.

While the building exterior was neo-classical, the iron framework of the interior was extremely modern for the 19th century, like that of the Gare d'Orsay railroad station of the same period.

Other displays include the jars and vestiges of the original royal apothecary of Louis XIV, and three Florentine marble marquetry tables from the palace of Cardinal Mazarin.

These include a large fragment of Canyon Diablo meteorite, a piece of an asteroid which fell in Arizona about 550,000 years ago, and created the Meteor crater.

Many of the plants were collected by Jean Baptiste Christophore Fusée Aublet, the royal pharmacist and botanist in French Guiana.

New plants and animal species were collected from around the world, examined, illustrated, classified, named and described in publications which were circulated across Europe and to America.

The gardens served as the laboratory of scientists including Jean Baptiste Lamarck, author of the earliest theory of evolution, and were a base for major scientific expeditions by Nicolas Baudin, Alexander von Humboldt, Jules Dumont d'Urville and others throughout the 18th and 19th century.

In the 20th century the larger animals were moved to the Paris Zoological Park, a more extensive site in the Bois de Vincennes.

The historical collections incorporated into the herbarium, each with its P prefix, include those of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (P-LA) René Louiche Desfontaines (P-Desf.

It publishes the botanical periodical Adansonia and journals on the flora of New Caledonia, Madagascar and Comoro Islands, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Cameroon, and Gabon.

The list of Chairs of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle includes major figures in the history of the Natural sciences.

Early chaired positions were held by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, René Desfontaines and Georges Cuvier, and later occupied by Paul Rivet, Léon Vaillant and others.

The Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy and other parts of Jardin des Plantes was a source of inspiration for French graphic novelist Jacques Tardi.

A) The cetaceum (podium of cetaceans), in the Comparative Anatomy gallery B) Statue of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, with Paul and Virginia C) The alpine garden D) The Hôtel de Magny E) The gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, with the statue of the First Artist by Paul Richer F) The Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology G) The greenhouse of New Caledonia built between 1834 and 1836 (at the time the "oriental pavilion") according to the plans of Charles Rohault de Fleury H) Cuvier's house on the left and the triangular pediment of the east wing of the Whale Pavilion on the right I) The Becquerel alley, north side, leads to Cuvier's house where Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896 J) The Paleontology gallery, on the second floor, with its mezzanine.

The second floor exhibits the vertebrate fossils and the mezzanine the invertebrate fossils K) One of the zoological shelters of the menagerie L The façade of the Musée de l'Homme, in the southwest wing of the Palais de Chaillot M The botanical museum of La Jaÿsinia, in the Alps N The excavations of the Pataud shelter, in Dordogne.