Personnel of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology of the Florida Museum of Natural History will identify fossils that have been legally collected or purchased.
To aid our identifications, tell us where the specimen was found, to the best of your knowledge. Our greatest expertise lies with specimens from Florida and the rest of the Southeast, and from the Caribbean region. We recommend you look elsewhere for help with specimens from outside of these regions.
A special note about “dinosaur eggs” from Florida. These are concretions, and are not fossils! There are no naturally occurring fossils of dinosaurs in the state. The nearest dinosaur fossils have been found in central western Georgia and central Alabama.
There are three basic methods we prefer:
- Electronic Images. Send us digital images of specimens either as email attachments in JPEG format (to vertpaleo@floridamuseum.ufl.edu) or post them on your own website and email us the address (URL) of the site. Please include a ruler or some other indication of scale in the image. Take pictures of more than one side of the specimen.
- Bring the Specimens to Dickinson Hall or our Collections Building. Please call or email us to make an appointment, as sometimes all of our personnel are out in the field or otherwise unavailable. Our email is vertpaleo@floridamuseum.ufl.edu, phone number is 352-273-1821 (Dickinson Hall) or 352-294-6363 (Collections Building). Dickinson Hall is located on the University of Florida campus at the intersection of Museum Road and Newell Drive. Our Collections Building is located off-campus in the northwest area of Gainesville.
- Please reach out to us before mailing specimens. Our email is vertpaleo@floridamuseum.ufl.edu, phone number is 352-273-1821 (Dickinson Hall) or 352-294-6363 (Collections Building). We are NOT responsible for damage done in transit both to and from the museum.
We are happy to provide this service to the public. For large collections (more than 10 specimens), we ask that you make a voluntary contribution, to offset the time involved, to the VP Research Fund in the UF Foundation. It supports fieldwork to collect fossils throughout Florida.