Science Stories Archive
Archived Stories - New Species
(04/2009) Participants search for fossils at the Florida Museum of Natural History's 18th Annual Thomas Farm Fossil Dig, which took place this year from March 31 to April 5. The site, located about 45 miles northwest of Gainesville, contains...
(03/2009) When asked if mountains grow slowly and steadily versus in rapid spurts, most people intuitively gravitate to the "slow and steady" model. Mountains, we are taught, take an incomprehensively...
(02/2009) When most people hear the words Guantanamo Bay, they immediately think of the infamous prison built there in 2001. But for Roger Portell, an invertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Guantanamo means the chance to collect...
(12/2008) In May 2008, a team of researchers from the Florida Museum traveled to Madagascar to search remaining patches of lowland forest for land snails and to document new snail species. Non-marine mollusks like land snails are the animal group...
(06/2008) Tourists who comb Florida's sandy beaches for exotic shells are probably unaware that they're also picking through bits of geologic history. Incalculable numbers of fossilized marine invertebrates pepper the Sunshine State...
(02/2008) Surprisingly, McGuire Center Collections Manager George Austin came across the species while curating butterflies in the Florida Museum, which houses one of the world's largest collections at more than 6 million specimens...
(02/2008) Brachykolon lives in the Himalayan Foothills Subprovince of Pakistan at about 5,575 to 6,500 feet above sea level. It is found in Chir Pine forests and grasslands disturbed by people for agriculture. Like many other geckos in Pakistan...
(10/2007) It’s a mammoth job, setting out to document all the butterflies of South America’s tropical Andean cordillera...But Florida Museum of Natural History butterfly researcher Keith Willmott and his colleagues are relishing the task...
(07/2007) Gustav Paulay, a curator of invertebrate zoology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is participating in several large-scale marine biodiversity surveys to find and document as many existing invertebrate species as possible, before they disappear forever...
(05/2007) The Herbarium at the Florida Museum of Natural History is run jointly by the Museum and the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Including the associated fossil plant collection, it houses about 500,000 vascular plants, moss and lichen...
(04/2007) The roots of the primate family tree are now more clearly defined in the fossil record, and about 10 million years older than thought, according to Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch and...
(4/2007) Florida Museum ornithologists David Steadman and Andrew Kratter turned up the surprising new discovery on a collecting expedition in the Solomon Islands. Theirs is the first frogmouth from these islands to be caught by scientists in more than 100 years...
(10/2005) “Into Africa” rather than “Out of Africa” could well be the better description of how certain mammals originated and spread across the world...
(02/2004) The National Science Foundation has awarded the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and four other institutions $4.7 million to discover and describe all catfish species worldwide...