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This Collection of Mollusks is one of the more important of the large, old collections in Europe, going back to King Frederik III's "Kunstkammer" from the 1650's

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The Museum houses some120,000 Mollusk specimens.

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Molluscs are one of the most important groups of invertebrates. They live in the sea, on land, and in fresh water. Many species are of economic interest or important as indicators of environmental quality. Furthermore, consequentially to their long and well documented paleontological history they play an important role in stratigraphy and evolutionary research.

• The Molluscs comprise Chitons, Gastropods, Bivalves, Octopuses and Squids, Tusk shells and the two less well known groups, Monoplacophora and Aplacophora.

The Mollusc Collections contain about 280.000 dry lots and about 40.000 lots in alcohol. Marine molluscs are well represented from the Arctic and Antarctic, the North Atlantic ocean and southern South America. For land and terrestrial molluscs, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries are well covered. The dry collections are mainly uncatalogued; those in alcohol are manually catalogued with catalogue number- and genus-species entries in the catalogue. Computer cataloguing is based on an "adapted" Filemaker Pro 4.0 commercial application of Claris Corporation (USA). The Molluscan Research has a long and illustrious history within this museum.
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The Malacology Collection is comprise of the following sections:

• Molluscs of the world (~124,000, many type specimens)
• Seashells of the world (~7,500)
• Seashells from Mozambique (~12,000)
• Land snails (esp. from Africa, ~6,000)
• Fresh water snails from Thailand, land snails from Libya (~12,000, many paratypes)
• Molluscs of Switzerland (~1,000 & type specimens)

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The Malacology Collection which is the collection of recent mollusks is the oldest in the country, and the second largest catalogued one in the world. It currently has more than 430,000 catalogued lots containing about 12 million specimens, including 30,000-35,000 lots preserved in ethanol. Type specimens of more than 400 authors are represented in more than 12,000 type lots covering specimens from all over the world. Greatest strengths are in shallow-water marine mollusks from the tropical Indo-Pacific and the Western Atlantic and worldwide freshwater and land mollusks.

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