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Florida Museum of Natural History

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Florida Museum of Natural History

The Florida Museum of Natural History, located at the University of Florida, inspires people to care about life on Earth. This site is not a public forum.
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Our exhibits building is currently CLOSED for an expansion project. Full info: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/visit/expansion/ The Florida Museum of Natural History intends to educate, inform and provide updated information on its activities and to support and promote its objectives for these activities through its page. All Florida Museum comments are made by Museum designees. Social

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09/06/2026

Butterfly Bluetooth 🦋 Scientists recently started using small, solar-powered radio transmitters—about the size and weight of a grain of rice—to track the movements of monarch butterflies. The transmitters will help Florida Museum and Xerces Society scientists better understand how these insects move across the landscape and exactly where it is they go to.

“For decades, we’ve known monarchs return to Florida every year, but we still don’t fully understand where many of them go afterward or how they move across the landscape,” said Jaret Daniels, curator of Lepidoptera here at the Florida Museum. “These tags give us a chance to begin answering those questions in real time.”

Ray Moranz, a University of Florida alumnus who now works with The Xerces Society is partnering with Jaret on the effort to track these iconic butterflies and document what has been a mystery.

“We know Florida plays an important role in the monarch life cycle, but many details are still missing,” Ray said. “This technology allows us to move beyond snapshots and actually follow the butterflies’ journeys. In April, our initial results showed a few adults moving north to Georgia and Alabama. In May, we saw even more movement north, including a monarch that flew from the heart of the UF campus to southeastern Ohio in less than three weeks.”

Monarch butterflies have been proposed for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and learning where they travel is a critical part of developing a conservation plan to protect them.

🦋 Story:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/tiny-transmitters-could-unlock-monarch-migration-mysteries-in-florida/

09/05/2026

TUESDAY Sept 8 🎣 Science on Tap: Keeping it (Swamp) Eel

We're joining UF Thompson Earth Systems Institute at Cypress & Grove Brewing Co. to learn how swamp eels arrived in Florida’s waters, what makes them so successful, and what scientists are learning about their role in Florida’s freshwater ecosystems.

What exactly are swamp eels?

While not true eels, swamp eels are eel-like freshwater fishes with remarkable biological adaptations that have helped them spread from their native range to waterways around the world.

Featured Scientist

Rob Robins is the collection manager of the Ichthyology (study of fish) collection here at the Florida Museum, which is home to almost 3 million fish specimens. He is coauthor of “Fishes in the Fresh Waters of Florida” and studies nonindigenous fishes in Florida. His favorite fish is not a fish at all—his true love is snakes!

Event info:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/event/sot-keeping-it-swamp-eel-9-8-26/

09/04/2026

Exhibit Spotlight 🦏 Florida Miocene

Camelids, transitional horses and bear-dogs populate early Florida's grassland savannahs and woodland habitats in this painting from our exhibit Florida Fossils exhibit.

And rhinos!

It might be hard to imagine rhinos wandering through our natural spaces here in Florida today, but back in the Miocene Epoch they were quite common. Earlier species of rhinos looked a little different, and this featured species didn't have a horn to protect itself, but it was still a formidable animal in its time.

This painting takes us back to the Miocene Epoch....

Florida Miocene 🎨 23 to 5 million years ago
Now cooler, drier and more seasonal than the previous epoch, the once lush wet forests disappeared and were replaced by grassland savannas with mixed woodlands. These are habitats that supported a wide range of food for browsing and grazing animals, and the predators that followed them.

🗝️ This painting from our Florida Fossils exhibit has a key to the animals represented:

1. Leptarctus ancipidens (tree-dwelling badger)
2. Floridatragulus dolicanthereus (long-chinned camel)
3. Parahippus leonensis (three-toed transitional horse)
4. Rhegminornis calobatus (small stilted turkey)
5. Columbina prattae (Pratt’s dove)
6. Caudochelys tedwhitei (Ted White’s tortoise)
7. Floridaceras whitei (White’s rhino)
8. Parablastomeryx floridanus (Florida musk deer)
9. Amphicyon longiramus (White’s bear dog)
10. Prosynthetoceras texanus (Texas slingshot horned artiodactyl)
11. Chilabothrus stanolseni (West Indian boa)
12. Archaeohippus blackbergi (three-toed dwarf horse)
13. Petauristodon pattersoni (Patterson’s flying squirrel)
14. Alligator olseni (Olsen’s alligator)
15. Metatomarctos canavus (small hyena-like dog)

Explore this painting from our exhibit and more fossils from the Florida Miocene:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/blog/florida-miocene-painting-by-bob-beach/

Florida Miocene painting by Bob Beach

09/03/2026

Science or art? 🩻 Ichthyologists (fish biologists) use two main techniques to prepare skeletons from preserved specimens of all shapes and sizes without losing their natural skeletal positions: clearing and staining and computed tomography (CT) scanning.

🐠 CT Scanning for Accessibility & Preservation

Museum technology is shifting how fish skeletons are processed providing more accessibility for research, education, outreach and global collaboration.

Using industrial micro CT scanners, we can capture a specimen’s anatomy in a non-destructive way, digitally capturing soft tissue and skeletal anatomy. Behind the scenes, what this is doing is taking hundreds to thousands of x-ray images to create a whole specimen in a 360 degree rotation and combining them to make a 3D model.

Natural history museums are using industrial micro CT scanners to capture a specimen’s anatomy in a non-destructive way. Through the use of x-rays, they digitally capture soft tissue and skeletal anatomy in 3D without causing damage or alteration to the specimen. Similar to getting a CT scan at the hospital, they capture hundreds to thousands of x-ray images of a whole specimen in a 360- degree rotation.

Featured image: These beautifully colored specimen images are more than art. Density in CT scans can be colorized to tell us more about an animal at a glance. On the histogram here, left is low density (usually cooler colors) and right is high density (usually warmer colors).

Inner Beauty 🩻 Skeletons Revealed from the Museum’s Fish Collection
Explore online exhibit:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/inner-beauty/

Florida Museum image by Zach Randall

09/02/2026

Happy Habitat 💙 Miami Blue Butterflies

The Miami blue is a small blue butterfly found only in Florida and is one of the most critically endangered butterflies in the United States.

Today, the only known wild populations can be found in the Key West and Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuges in the Florida Keys. They occur on isolated islands and can be found along beaches.

Online Exhibit 💙 Endangered Butterflies in a Changing Climate
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/miami-blue-butterflies/

Specific Habitat Needs

The Florida Keys are composed of over 1,000 small islands and contain a variety of different habitats. The Miami blue butterfly thrives in these coastal areas, especially along the beaches which are home to a diverse array of plants and animals uniquely adapted to these conditions.

The Miami blue’s host plants, Keys blackbead and grey nickerbean, are both common on South Florida beaches. In addition to their host plants, the Miami blue butterfly also requires nectar flowers in order to survive. Some of their preferred flowers include scorpion tail (Heliotropium angiospermum) and snow squarestem (Melanthera nivea).

Conservation & Restoration

In order to restore populations of this endangered butterfly, researchers are breeding the Miami blue in captivity and releasing butterflies in the wild within its historical range.

Once released, butterflies will fly out in search of flower nectar, mates, and eventually a suitable plant to lay their eggs.

Explore our online exhibit and learn more about the conservation work to restore populations of this tiny species of butterfly:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/miami-blue-butterflies/

09/01/2026

Online Exhibit 🌀 Earth’s Forecast: Hurricanes and Climate Change

Recipe for a Hurricane

Hurricanes are a type of tropical cyclone – a rapidly rotating storm system with a low-pressure center, closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms. In order for a hurricane to form, four main ingredients are needed:

1. Pre-existing weather disturbance
2. Warm ocean waters
3. High humidity
4. Light winds high in the atmosphere

Hurricane formation begins when warm tropical water evaporates and rises. Cool air rushes in to fill the gap and the process repeats. Warm, moist air in the atmosphere condenses into huge storm clouds that spiral around a central column of wind. If there is enough warm water to continue fueling the process and no strong winds to break the system apart, a cyclone forms.

Seasons Greetings!

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30. In the northeastern Pacific, the season runs from May 15 to November 30. In the northwestern Pacific, typhoons are most common from late June through December. And the northern Indian Ocean sees cyclones from April to December.

🌀 Wild Winds

Tropical cyclones are categorized according to wind speed:

- Tropical Depression: less than 39 mph
- Tropical Storm: 39-73 mph
- Hurricane: greater than 74 mph
🔹Category 1: 74-95 mph
🔹Category 2: 96-110 mph
- Major Hurricane:
🔹Category 3: 111 to 129 mph
🔹Category 4: 130 to 156 mph
🔹Category 5: 157 or higher mph

Learn more about 🌀 Earth’s Forecast: Hurricanes and Climate Change
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/online/hurricanes-climate-change/

08/31/2026

Scientist Spotted 🌳 How do scientists know elephants and manatees are closely related? What is a cryptic species? What is the oldest lineage of animals? And what are myxozoans? Learn about carnivorous plants, flamingos, water lilies and fungi!

Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor here at the Florida Museum, collaborated with LabX on fun video shorts talking about the Tree of Life, how it helps researchers, and what we can learn by examining it.

🌳 Meet Doug and check out the videos and topics:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/museum-blog/tree-of-life-evolution-doug-soltis-labx-video-collab/

OR jump right to the YouTube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVPQsm3VV-M8&si=NyWfkbkeXEUP1qSO

LabX is a program of the National Academy of Sciences. Their goal: Bold experiments with a variety of creative—sometimes even unorthodox—approaches designed to reach diverse audiences.

08/30/2026

“What continually amazes me is just how much time a bunch of fossils collected from a single sediment layer can represent. In some cases, well-preserved fossil organisms that are found next to each other might have lived hundreds or thousands of years apart,” wrote paleontologist Rafal Nawrot.

A square meter of seafloor can be perforated by hundreds of tunnels through which crawl and writhe a cornucopia of clams, shrimp, sea stars, sand dollars, snails, worms and other animals. All that excavation mixes up the sediment, along with any shells and other skeletal remains that happen to be there.

This temporal smearing is a problem for paleontologists, because when that piece of seafloor is buried and becomes part of the fossil record, it’s difficult and expensive to figure out how much mixing took place.

🐚 Over the course of 20 years, an international team of scientists collected and carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world.

Scientists used the dataset to determine which of several environmental factors contributes most to time averaging, a phenomenon in which organisms that lived in different time periods are mixed and preserved together in the same fossil bed.

The results indicate that sedimentation is more important than other factors, such as the number of burrowing animals in a given area or the durability of fossils.

Knowing that the rate of sedimentation is the single most important factor in determining the extent to which fossils of different ages become mixed will unlock research avenues that were previously restricted.

“The dataset is incredibly powerful. We’re now working on multiple follow-up projects that explore various aspects of time averaging and related processes. You can use it to answer a lot of questions, but of course, we started with the big one,” said Michal Kowalewski, the Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology here at the Florida Museum.

Through this unique collaboration, Michal and his colleagues have what is possibly the largest collection of fossil carbon dates ever compiled, which can now be used on a variety of research topics that would have been intractable otherwise.

🌊 Story:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/paleontologists-spent-20-years-carbon-dating-thousands-of-marine-fossils-then-used-them-to-decode-a-process-fundamental-to-earths-history/

08/29/2026

What's growing in your garden? The flowers you plant will attract different kinds of pollinators and even support them in their larval stages.

🐝 Featured: Dotted horsemint (Monarda punctata), also known as spotted beebalm, attracts many butterflies, bees and other pollinators.

Museum Resource 🌼 Florida's Wildflowers & Butterflies

Our guide to 50 of Florida's most common wildflowers and butterflies will help you learn about flowers that grow best in your area. You can search by color or county, or just scroll through to get ideas.

Or toggle to the butterfly side of our guide and learn what to plant to entice them to your yard.

Browse online guide:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wildflowers/

08/28/2026

“For decades, we’ve known monarchs return to Florida every year, but we still don’t fully understand where many of them go afterward or how they move across the landscape,” said Jaret Daniels, curator of Lepidoptera here at the Florida Museum. “These tags give us a chance to begin answering those questions in real time.”

Scientists recently started using small, solar-powered radio transmitters—about the size and weight of a grain of rice—to track the movements of monarch butterflies. The transmitters will help Florida Museum and Xerces Society scientists better understand how these insects move across the landscape and exactly where it is they go to.

Ray Moranz, a University of Florida alumnus who now works with The Xerces Society is partnering with Jaret on the effort to track these iconic butterflies and document what has been a mystery.

“We know Florida plays an important role in the monarch life cycle, but many details are still missing,” Ray said. “This technology allows us to move beyond snapshots and actually follow the butterflies’ journeys. In April, our initial results showed a few adults moving north to Georgia and Alabama. In May, we saw even more movement north, including a monarch that flew from the heart of the UF campus to southeastern Ohio in less than three weeks.”

Monarch butterflies have been proposed for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and learning where they travel is a critical part of developing a conservation plan to protect them.

🦋 Story:
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/tiny-transmitters-could-unlock-monarch-migration-mysteries-in-florida/

Address

3215 Hull Road
Gainesville, FL
32611

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 5pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	10am - 5pm
Sunday	1pm - 5pm

Telephone

+13528462000

Website

http://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/

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