| Summary: | Lodovico Foresti (Bologna, 1829-1913) was a typical “positivist” 19th century’s paleontologist, who built-up an important Tertiary fossil mollusc collection, partly still preserved in the Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini of Bologna. During his life he focused his work on a quite restricted area of the Northern Apennines: the Tertiary and Quaternary formations between the provinces of Forlì-Cesena and Modena, in particular the nearest foothills of the Province of Bologna between the rivers Santerno and Panaro. During his field work he recovered also some important vertebrate remains, a whale that he named Cetotheriophanes capellini (=Balaenoptera acutorostrata) and a sirenid (Felsinotherium forestii). As for most of his mollusc collection, he donated all the vertebrate specimens to the Museum founded by Giovanni Capellini. He also published some papers describing many localities today impossible to re-sample because of both antropication and/or natural factors. After Foresti, paleontologists only occasionally worked on this area, thus one of our aims was to test the possibility to update the knowledge on the Bolognese Pliocene starting from Foresti’s sites. Moreover, many of the still existing sites studied by Lodovico Foresti are also interesting under a environmental and historical point of view, so they offer the chance to create one or more multidisciplinary didactic routes. From a museological point of view, we attempted to rebuild the relationship between an ancient collection of fossils and the territory, this permitted us to improve the contextualization of the collection itself and the scientific content of single specimens. This work in progress includes a museologic study on the state of the collections, a taxonomic revision of the specimens and a census of the extant sites of provenance. In addiction we chose a sample area in the “Argille Azzurre” formation near Bologna which includes some outcrops described by Foresti, for a stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental analysis.
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