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 415,000 are catalogued and on a searchable computer database. Holotypes number about 200 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.
Fall 2009 Volunteer Fossil Dig to be held at Thomas Farm
Help uncover history! Join Museum scientists at the world famous Thomas Farm fossil site in Gilchrist County this October and November. Learn More!
Recent Discoveries - World's Largest Snake
The largest snake the world has ever known — as long as a school bus and as heavy as a small car — ruled tropical ecosystems only 6 million years after the demise of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a new discovery published in the journal Nature.
Illustration by Jason Bourque, Florida Museum fossil preparator, who was a co-author on the paper and the first to
recognize that the fossils belonged to a snake and not some other type of large reptile.
Partial skeletons of a new giant, boa constrictor-like snake named Titanoboa were found in Colombia by an international team of scientists co-led by Jonathan Bloch, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology. They are estimated to be 42 to 45 feet long, the length of the T-Rex "Sue" displayed at Chicago's Field Museum.
"Prior to our work, there had been no fossil vertebrates found between 65 million and 55 million years ago in tropical South America, leaving us with a very poor understanding of what life was like in the northern Neotropics," Bloch said. "Now we have a window into the time just after the dinosaurs went extinct and can actually see what the animals replacing them were like."