This Mineralogical and Paleontological Museum was set up in the seventeenth-century convent of the Capuchin Friars of Masullas, in homage to how much the work of religious in monasteries and convents, since the European Middle Ages, has been crucial for the cultural and scientific development of the West .

It was from the disappearance of Charlemagne that the monasteries became the center of European science and culture; in libraries, scriptorias and their workshops, science, the arts and literature grew freely for a long time. For centuries, the monks were the custodians of ancient Western culture and with them science developed fully, albeit as a “handmaid of the faith”.

But the monasteries also had the fundamental function of a meeting point along the itineraries of pilgrimages of faith, thus becoming also powerful disseminators of the culture, sciences and technology they had long guarded. Functions, the latter, entrusted above all to museums from the 1700s onwards.

Since then, acquiring and preserving naturalistic cultural assets, promoting their study and disclosing their peculiarities, has been the primary mission of modern natural science museums. The absence of these museum centers in Sardinia has produced a worrying depletion of our many naturalistic treasures that were already recognized by the first explorers.