The Natural History Museum is currently divided into several detached collections, some located in the Central Building, others decentralised to the Botanical Garden.

On the first floor of the University’s Central Building are the zoological collections displayed in the Systematics Gallery, set up in 1925 by Angelo Andres, and the African zoological-ethnographic collections: the Eritrean Bottego collection and the Congolese Piola collection, both dating from the early 20th century.

The other collections, placed in 1980 inside the Botanical Garden 1 km from the Central Palace, have an idactic and territorial focus and are centred on the themes of nature conservation, sustainability and the protection of biodiversity: fauna and fossils from the Parma area (Del Prato and Strobel collections), Lepidoptera (Boarini collection), Cnidarians, Marine Molluscs, Echinoderms, and a Congolese ethnographic collection (Ferrante collection), also from the 20th century.