The Poligny Museum was founded in 1860 on the second floor of the Town Hall building, where it has remained ever since. Over the years, the museum’s collections have grown rapidly, thanks to donations from Poligny residents, purchases and exchanges. Their richness and variety cover fields as varied as archaeology, ethnology, fine arts, ornithology and palaeontology. The museum has been closed since the Second World War.
The museum’s major collections are the gigantic dinosaur bones discovered in the Chasagne forest during the construction of the Besançon-Lyon railway line in 1862. Ethnological objects take us on a journey from Kabylia to New Caledonia, via the Marquesas Islands. The museum’s collections include two albums of photographs taken between 1880 and 1890 in Tahiti and New Caledonia.
Finally, there is the herbarium, most of which was collected by Augé de Lassus, Receiver of Finances in Poligny and a member of the Société Botanique de France. It was compiled in the mid-nineteenth century and contains 4,500 samples of plants, fungi and algae collected in various locations (Jura, southern France and Algeria).
