Founded as the eighteenth-century university collections of paleontology and mineralogy, with which it shares the origin, the Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy has as its purpose to preserve faunal remains of particular interest to the local area. Following legacies by citizens of Modena and purchases, which occurred on several occasions between 1830 and 1845, the heritage of the museum has increased rapidly, especially in the field of ornithology, thanks to frequent donations from the Duke Francesco IV with exotic specimens bred at court and died in captivity, both of local wildlife. Recently, the zoological collections have seen an increase thanks to new materials donated by private or public bodies, or from seizures at taxidermists or confiscated from hunters or the result of stidy collections. Housed within the university Department of Animal Biology, has today roughly 3.000-3.500 naturalized vertebrates (birds, mammals, fishes, reptiles), a hundred of them from the vertebrate Modena fauna, mounted in the form of small dioramas; about 1.000 specimens of vertebrates (especially fishes and reptiles) preserved in liquid; about 250 skeletons and anatomical parts of vertebrates; few hundred invertebrates preserved in alcohol or formalin. The assets also includes a large malacologistic collection consists few thousand boxes, each with one or more copies; a hundred entomological boxes with an unknown number of specimens; ten cases with a rich collection of animal parasites and poisonous (Collection Franchini).