The "Leo Pardi" Department was formed in 1985 by merging the Institutes of Comparative Anatomy, General Biology and Genetics and Zoology, whose long tradition of research, dating back to the Imperial Regio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale (founded in 1775) it has inherited. The Department occupies the same building that formerly housed the Lorraine institution and that still today houses the Zoological Museum "La Specola". After Tuscany had been annexed to the Kingdom of Savoy, university courses were begun in what was to become the Istituto di Studi Superiori. With the establishing of the University of Florence, in the 1920s, the Department became part of the university.

The Department possesses a collection of instruments consisting mainly of microscopes, microtomes and scales that were used in research laboratories from the late 19th century up to the middle of the 20th. Most of the eighteenth-nineteenth century heritage is now conserved in the Florence Institute and Museum of the History of Science. Among other items, the collection contains light chambers, sets of weights, slides with prepared specimens and bottles.