Science Stories Archive
Archived Stories - 2008
(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...
(11/2008) It's easy to get carried away romanticizing the cushy lives of the fabulously wealthy, even those who lived in exotic ancient cultures. We may pin all sorts of stereotypes to them: that they employed...
(12/2008) Scientists collected lice from two mummified heads, similar to the one shown above, that were so well preserved even their long braids were still intact. Samples of the lice were...
(11/2008) The process of resource overexploitation is not a new one. Rather, it began prehistorically – as green turtles from Coralie, a turtle harvesting site within the Turks and Caicos Islands, illustrate...
(10/2008) When you finish your chicken dinner, your next step is most likely to toss the leftover bones in the garbage. And if you hunt, you probably discard the bones after skinning and gutting your hard-earned carcass. What else would you do with old bones, right?...
(10/2008) Globally, nearly all sawfish species are declining largely due to coastal habitat threats and over-fishing, but dwindling northern populations of smalltooth sawfish in the Atlantic may get a helping hand...
(09/2008) Florida Butterfly Monitoring Network researchers and citizen scientists document the presence of local butterfly species and their numbers so that scientists and conservationists...
(09/2008) The origins of when flowers managed to harness insects' pollinating power has long been murky. But the new study is the first to pinpoint...
(08/2008) Florida Museum of Natural History and University of Texas at Austin scientists have shed light on what Charles Darwin called the "abominable mystery" of early plant evolution...
(07/2008) The Butterfly Conservation Initiative was created in 2001 to work with federal and state organizations to aid in the conservation of threatened, endangered and vulnerable North American butterflies and the habitats that sustain them...
(07/2008) Time is slowing down—way down—for a select collection of DNA specimens at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They are housed in a double-walled cryogenic freezer at minus 196 degrees Celsius (minus 320.8 degrees Fahrenheit)...
(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...
(06/2008) Scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin made the landmark discovery that prehistoric aquatic critters such as beetles and small crustaceans unwittingly swim into resin flowing down into the water....
(06/2008) The Turks and Caicos are truly blessed. The crystal clear waters surrounding the Islands contain an abundance of marine life. As Columbus noted, many of these are marvelous to see, while others are marvelous to eat. The Spanish recorded more than...
(05/2008) The unusual discovery of well-preserved fossils in a water-filled sinkhole called a blue hole revealed the bones of landlubbing crocodiles and tortoises that did not survive human encroachment...
(04/2008) A study published by Kitty Emery, Florida Museum Assistant Curator of Environmental Archeology, is the first to document ancient hunting effects on large-game species in the Maya lowlands of Central America...
(03/2008) David Steadman, a paleo-ornithologist at the Florida Museum, has an ambitious goal to find the oldest hummingbird fossils in North America, and says the perfect spot to search may be within an hour's drive from Gainesville...
(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...
(01/2008) Scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History are fine-tuning conservation knowledge about endangered Florida panthers by studying their bones and pelts. Our researchers recently concluded...
(01/2008) A Florida Museum of Natural History herpetologist searching for scientific causes of the so-far-unexplained giant hellbender salamander decline in the U.S. said that we can rule out flooding in many habitats, but that both illegal and scientific collecting of the species may...