Specimens in a pull-out drawer displayed in the Beneski Museum

Oreodont skulls (approximately 30 million years old) stored in a cabinet within the Vertebrate Paleontology collection

The Amherst College Museum's Vertebrate Paleontology Collection is the third most outstanding in New England (after the Yale Peabody Museum and the Harvard University Natural History Museum). It consists of over 22,000 specimens, including 85 types (the first-discovered specimen of a fossil species). A strong science curriculum from the College's beginnings in the 1820s has been a key factor in developing the strength of the Collection which today includes representatives of all the major groups, while strongest in Cenozoic South and North American mammals.