Invertebrates (animals without backbones)
Peregrin Strobel was succeeded by another important zoologist: Angelo Andres. During his directorship the collections housed in the Via Università Section were put on permanent display. The specimens come from all over the world and in the past decades they were used as a learning help for university students.
This extensive collection, which is housed in several galleries, was originally gathered up with a prevailing scientific aim and not for popularization.
It consists of many specimens of sponges, cnidarians (corals and madrepores), molluscs and echinoderms. It is particularly rich in marine molluscs: 63 large-sized specimens, around 4000 contained in small single boxes.
Vertebrates (animals with backbones)
This large collection is housed in a gallery which is next to the Bottego one and was finished by Angelo Andres in 1925. He probably merged several previous collections aiming at showing world biodiversity in the field of vertebrates. The result is a collection that preserves a 19th-century arrangement of specimens, that are but put on display in a more modern, evolutionary way (which was not obvious at that time). Nevertheless, displaying such a great number of specimens is considered old-fashioned nowadays. The collection is also rich in mammals from large-sized pinnipedsto small rodents and there are also many birds.
At the back of the gallery visitors can admire several reptiles both from Europe and exotic countries: among them monitor lizards, snakes and rattles of rattlesnakes. Near a wall stands a jar of an Australian fish which has got lungs Neoceratodus forsteri and can breathe for some time, when the water where it lives becomes to go short. Today this fish is threatened with extinction.
On display there are also a rare set of eggs and one of nests. Along a wall lies the skeleton of a fossil whale, founded in the area known today as Piacenza hills. There it died, when, some million years ago, in the Early Pliocene, that land formed the coastline of a marine gulf.
At the back of the Systematic gallery, visitors enter a small, fascinating gallery: the skeletons gallery. On display are some typically 19th-century collections but they are extraordinarily interesting from scientific and didactic points of view. The name of the gallery is due to the several skeletons of vertebrates there on display, chiefly of mammals. The reconstructions are all fixed into a natural position and among them those of a giraffe and a dromedary stand out. Along the walls stand some cabinets showing horns and antlersand bones of a great number of animals. A narrow glass cabinet contains human skulls of (probably) roman soldiers, who died near Brescia in the 1stcentury A.D.