Amber fossils provide oldest evidence of frogs in wet, tropical forests
About 99 million years ago, a tiny juvenile frog in present-day Myanmar was suddenly trapped in sap with a beetle, perhaps its intended next meal. Unlucky for...
Houses of silk, poop and plants: Meet the sack-bearer moths
Ryan St Laurent, a doctoral student at the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, studies an obscure, strange family of moths...
Butterfly expert Thomas Emmel has died
The Florida Museum is shocked and saddened by the passing of Thomas Emmel, our colleague and friend, who died over the weekend, apparently from natural causes,...
40 years of friendship, 70,000 specimens: Amateur entomologists donate lifetimes’ worth of butterflies and moths
As a 4-year-old, butterfly net in hand, Ed Knudson set out to catch insects in his neighborhood. Little did he know his hobby would grow into a lifelong...
Teachers receive fossils, create lesson plans at museum workshop
Florida Museum of Natural History researchers and amateur paleontologists teamed up to give K-12 teachers a crash course that came with some impressive party...
NSF grant will improve digital access to museum vertebrate fossils
The Florida Museum of Natural History recently received a $500,000 collections grant from the National Science Foundation to improve online accessibility of...
Museum biologist joins ‘moonshot’ project to sequence DNA of all eukaryotes
Florida Museum of Natural History plant biologist Pam Soltis is part of a 24-member team that aims to sequence the DNA of all of Earth’s known plants,...
Austin, Bullen 2018 student research award winners named
The Florida Museum of Natural History recently announced the winners of the 2018 Austin Award and Bullen Award for student research and significant...
New butterfly species discovered nearly 60 years after it was first collected
In 1959, a then-teenage lepidopterist Thomas Emmel collected 13 fawn-colored butterflies in the highlands of Mexico. Nearly 60 years later, those butterflies...
Turtle shells help decode complex links between modern, fossil species
Imagine that Labradors and golden retrievers died out a million years ago, leaving only fossilized skeletons behind. Without the help of DNA, how could we...