Paléorama

The Fossil Museum offers a prestigious display of fossils of exceptional scientific interest, bearing witness to the flora and fauna that populated the region (then situated below the equator) in the distant past when the plant deposits that were the precursors of coal accumulated at the bottom of a marshy mountain valley. Indeed, between the layers of coal formed by the transformation of plant debris, the shales and sandstones of the coalfield harbour numerous traces of life that have been preserved in the mud or sand and have thus miraculously come down to us.
A life-size carboniferous forest has been reconstructed from resin elements donated by the Lille Museum of Natural History,
A remarkable transparent block diagram measuring almost 8 metres in length, the plan-coupe sur verre, bequeathed by La Houillère, is undoubtedly the museum's centrepiece, providing a 3-dimensional view of the position of the coal layers in the region's subsoil.
Artificial intelligence applied to the digitised sections now enables the continuity of the layers to be reconstructed, in a 3D presentation on a large interactive video touch screen.
Videograms recount the history of the Earth and the formation of coal.