FLMNH Vertebrate Fossil Collections
The Florida Museum maintains five separate fossil vertebrate collections. Their specimens derive mainly from the Cenozoic Era (last 65 million years), with more than 80% coming from about 1000 localities in Florida. Other major contributing regions are islands in the Caribbean Basin, Central and South America, and intermontaine basins of Wyoming and Montana. Combined, the collections total about 750,000 specimens, of which more than 445,000 are catalogued and on a searchable computer database. Holotypes number about 225 specimens.
The primary and largest of our collections consists of specimens recovered by Florida Museum of Natural History staff, graduate students, and volunteers and those donated to the museum. This collection is referred to as the UF collection. The other vertebrate fossil collections are the former collection of the Florida Geological Survey, portions of the Timberlane Research Organization collection, and the UF Department of Zoology Fossil Bird Collection (assembled by the late Professor Pierce Brodkorb). Each of these collections is maintained in a separate catalog, under the acronyms UF/FGS, UF/TRO, and UF/PB, respectively. The fifth collection (UF/IGM) is maintained for specimens collected in Colombia by joint expeditions of personnel from the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Geologico-Mineras (Bogota, Colombia), and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Following their preparation, casting, study, and publication, the original fossils will be housed in Bogota and casts will be stored in Gainesville.
The FLMNH collections provide the most complete basis available for study of Cenozoic vertebrate life and evolution in the eastern United States and the circum-Caribbean Basin area.
Information about Annual Spring 2012 Fossil Dig with at Thomas Farm--click here to download information and application form.
Southestern Association of Vertebrate Paleontology Meeting
Clink on above link for a report about this scientific conference held in May, 2011 at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Information about the 2012 meeting in Boone, North Carolina can be found here.
FLORIDA MUSEUM PALEONTOLOGIST AND COLLEAGUES DISCOVER TIGHT CORRELATION BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND BODY SIZE IN THE OLDEST NORTH AMERICAN HORSES
Florida Museum of Natural History curator of vertebrate paleontology Jonathan Bloch, former museum post-doc Ross Secord (now at the University of Nebraska), UF anthropology professor Jonathan Krigbaum, and six other co-authors published the results of a multi-year study in the prestiguous journal Science on February 24, 2012. The study is based on seven field seasons collecting earliest Eocene fossils in Wyoming with the exact position of each fossil's location recorded using a very high resolution GPS and used the latest geochemical methods to detect small differences in the relative amounts of oxygen and carbon isotopes in the tooth enamel of this fossils and in the rocks producing them. The field work in Wyoming resulted in the largest known collection of the first (oldest) member of the family Equidae in North America. Formerly known as Eohippus or Hyracotherium, these small mammals are now placed in the genus Sifrhippus. Their work shows that over a 175,000 year interval at the beginning of the Eocene Epoch, as temperatures initially got warmer, the average body size (based on the size of the fossil teeth) decreased, then as climates began to cool, average body size in the horses increased. While the basics of this pattern were previously known, and other co-existing species of mammals also show significant changes in size, the novelity of this study is use of GPS and geologic analysis of sediments to accumulate samples of specimens through the entire interval of global climate change (called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM) to show how well changes in body size matched those of avearge annual temperature.
More details, including a video interview with the participants can be found at this University of Florida website.
The complete bibliographic
citation of the new paper is:
Secord, R., J. I. Bloch, S. G. B. Chester, D. M. Boyer, A. R. Wood, S. L. Wing, M. J. Kraus, F. A. McInerney, and J. Krigbaum. 2012. Evolution of the earliest horses driven by climate change in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Science 335:959–962.
FLORIDA MUSEUM PALEONTOLOGISTS DISCOVER, NAME TWO NEW SPECIES OF CAMELS FROM PANAMA
For several decades, paleontologists have known that rocks exposed by construction alongside the Panama Canal contained fossils of land animals such as rhinos, horses, and rodents. These were about 17 to 16 million years old, and very similar to fossils of the same age found in coastal Texas and north-central Florida. But a few years ago, UF geology graduate student Aldon Rincón discovered the first fossils in the Las Cascadas Formation, a mixture of volcanic and sedimentary rocks that are found below the beds producing the other Panamanian fossils, and are about 23 million years old. They are the oldest vertebrate fossils known from Central America. In a research article published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Rincón and co-authors describe two new species of camels from the Las Cascadas Formation.
Both of the new species are placed in the genus Aguascalientia, which was previously only known by a single species from Mexico and West Texas. The research by Rincón et al. confirms that Aguascalientia is a member of an extinct subfamily in the camel family, known as the Floridatragulinae. As the name suggests, floridatragulines were first discovered in Florida, from the early Miocene Thomas Farm site in Gilchrist County. Floridatragulines are much smaller than today’s camels, and have short-crowned teeth like deer which indicate a diet of soft leaves and fruit. More information about the discovery can be found at this UF press release.
Rincón and colleagues are continuing to look for fossils in Panama and are making many other significant discoveries. This work is funded by a multi-year grant from the US National Science Foundation awarded to museum paleontology curators Bruce MacFadden and Jonathan Bloch. Additional scientific papers detailing these finds are either in press or in preparation.
The complete bibliographic citation of the new paper is:
Rincón, A. F., J. I. Bloch, C. Suarez, B. J. MacFadden, and C. A. Jaramillo. 2012. New floridatragulines (Mammalia, Camelidae) from the early Miocene Las Cascadas Formation, Panama. Journal of
Vertebrate Paleontology 32(2):456–475.