With a founding date of 1791, the museum is among the first-ever natural history collections made available to the public. The individual segments of the collection date back correspondingly to the beginning of the 19th century. Numerous objects possess therefore both a scientific and a cultural-historical value.

Until 1988 all the collections were housed within the permanent collection, either in base units underneath the main cabinets or behind reserve display cases. The year 1995, however, marked the completion of our external stacks housed in the museum's basement, which are equipped with a space-saving compacting system. Today the collections inside Bamberg's Museum of Natural History total about 180,000 documents.