Science Stories Archive
Archived Stories - 2007
(12/2007) As one approaches the plantation along the north coast from Nassau there are eight stone buildings that served as the homes for Wylly’s married slaves. These buildings are in relatively good condition, although their roofs have deteriorated. Next,...
(11/2007) Last season, nearly 220 complete skeletons were excavated from Haile 7G – some encased in plaster jackets, and some wrapped in protective tissues – and transported to the Museum’s Vertebrate Paleontology division, where they will...
(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...
(03/2007) About 3.3 million years ago, lice found on gorillas began to infest humans, Reed said. That they took up residence in the pubic region may have coincided with humans' loss of hair on the rest of their bodies...
(03/2007) Florida Museum of Natural History Paleobotany Curator Steve Manchester has concluded a three-year National Science Foundation project comparing 50-million-year old fossil forests of Europe, Asia and North America, aimed at unraveling ancient patterns...
(02/2007) The overwhelming majority of previous climate-change studies on the 400,000-year transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs, about 33.5 million years ago, focus on marine environments, but...
(02/2007) A new study provides evidence that the last inhabitants of Christopher Columbus’ first settlement desperately tried to extract silver from lead ore, originally brought from Spain for other uses, just before abandoning the failed mining operation in 1498...
(02/2007) Rewind 300 years and imagine you are a Spanish colonist in Florida fleeing for your life to the protection of St. Augustine's fortified walls. Or maybe you are a Native American desperate to escape the relentless assaults of...
(01/2007) Evidence from a study led by the Florida Museum of Natural History confirms that the carnivorous, seven-foot-tall "terror bird" likely arrived in North America from South America several million years before a land bridge connected the two continents...