The Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs (IEI) is located in the city of Lleida and is part of the Diputació de Lleida, a provincial administration dedicated to supporting municipalities. For more than 40 years, the IEI has collected and stored fossils from the quarries and currently its collection contains 4,001 specimens.
The collection of fossils of the lithographic limestones of Meià deposited in the Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, is very varied and with a provenance that ranges from isolated transfers from individuals, the transfer of far-reaching collections, materials collected in the IEI campaigns and, finally, excavations and collections carried out under the heritage preservation regulations of the Departament de Cultura of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
This diversity in the typology of the deposits, added to the fact that the IEI is not a museum registered within the museum system of the Generalitat de Catalunya, has meant that this magnificent collection of more than 4,000 fossils is in a situation that could be considered “unregularised”. Little by little, the Provincial Council of Lleida has been taking steps to consolidate and conserve this magnificent collection so that it continues to be, as it has been until now, a scientific and informative reference collection worldwide.
We can differentiate the collection into several types:
– Fossils from systematic campaigns: according to Bernat Vila (unpublished catalogue of fossils from the IEI), this collection is made up of 3,692 acronyms and correspond to the 19 excavation campaigns carried out by the Geo-palaeontology section between 1979 and 1998. Among these, we can consider that the campaigns of the years 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1998 (a total of 696 fossils) are already included in Law 9/1993 of the Catalan Heritage, which regulates both the collection and the deposit of fossils, so that the ownership of them would correspond to the Generalitat.
– Fossils from the Gómez-Pallerola collection: there are 950 acronyms donated by Enric Gómez-Pallerola, almost all from the towns of La Pedrera and La Cabroa.
– Sources from donations and/or transfers from individuals: according to Vila (unpublished catalogue) this part of the collection is made up of 986 acronyms donated by a total of 52 people or entities.
Collection statistics
Main article B. Vila (unpublished)
Within the collection of fossils of the IEI, those from La Pedrera (1,992, 35.34%) and those from La Cabroa (2,926, 51.91%) make up the majority of it (87.25% and 4,918 fossils). As for the taxa, there is an overrepresentation of some of them. According to Vila, the fish Ascalobos is the most represented with 586 specimens (10.19% of the collection), followed by the larva Mesopalingea leridae with 278 specimens (5.05%), coprolites (290 specimens, 5.05%), Insecta (278 specimens, 4.84%), Montsechia vidalii (241 specimens, 4.19%), indeterminate plants (224 specimens, 3.9%), indeterminate fishes (188 specimens, 3.27%), Zamites sp. (178 specimens, 3.1%), coleoptera (178 specimens, 3.1%) and blatidae (170 specimens, 2.96%).