The Department of Natural History at the Florida Museum, University of Florida, employs 28 faculty-curators and 22 collection managers who pursue great diverse scientific questions within anthropological, biological, and paleontological sciences.
Training the Next Generation of Scientists
The Department also houses a vibrant and diverse community of over 100 graduate students and 25 post-doctoral researchers. In any given year over 150 undergraduate students are trained in our collections and research labs. In the most recent fiscal year our faculty, associated staff, and students produced over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and taught 50 university courses.
Documenting Biodiversity and Cultural Heritage
Additionally, faculty-curators supervise the growth and maintenance of scientific collections containing more than 40 million of modern and fossil specimens of plants, animals, and archaeological and ethnographic materials – one of the largest such university-based resources in the world. Housed in the Florida Museum of Natural History (the official natural history museum of the state of Florida), these collections were initiated over a century ago and continue to grow rapidly. The collections house materials assembled from all over the world and are of inestimable value to understanding the history of life on earth.
Exceptional Productivity
The Department had an outstanding year with 27 faculty overseeing about $65 million in total external grant support for research and collection activities, including 36 new and 24 continuing grants totaling $8.3 million. This per-capita funding rate is high, even for a research-intensive university like the University of Florida.
Latest Research News
Scientists: ‘Time is ripe’ to use big data for planet-sized plant questions
A group of Florida Museum of Natural History scientists has issued a “call to action” to use big data to tackle longstanding questions about plant...
New butterfly named for pioneering 17th-century entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian
More than three centuries before initiatives to increase the number of women in STEM fields, 52-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian sailed across the Atlantic on a...
Oldest-known ancestor of modern primates may have come from North America, not Asia
About 56 million years ago, on an Earth so warm that palm trees graced the Arctic Circle, a mouse-sized primate known as Teilhardina first curled its fingers...