Qualla: Florida Museum of Natural History

Florida Museum of Natural History: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Todd Van Hoosear, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ten million butterflies and moths, pressed flat and pinned in rows, fill drawer after drawer inside the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. It is one of the largest Lepidoptera collections on the planet, rivaling the Natural History Museum in London. And it is just one department inside the Florida Museum of Natural History, a sprawling institution that holds more than 40 million specimens and artifacts across disciplines ranging from ichthyology to Caribbean archaeology. Chartered by the Florida Legislature in 1917 as the state's official natural history museum, the FLMNH sits on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, where its collections began as teaching materials at Florida Agriculture College back in the 1800s.

Image: Todd Van Hoosear | CC BY-SA 2.0

Florida Museum of Natural History: A Rainforest Behind Glass

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wtc69789, Public domain. The museum's most beloved attraction is alive. The Butterfly Rainforest is an enclosed outdoor space attached to the McGuire Center where more than 1,000 individual butterflies and moths, representing over 50 species, float among 600 plant species, waterfalls, and a controlled fo...

Image: Wtc69789 | Public domain

Florida Museum of Natural History: Walking Through Deep Time

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wtc69789, Public domain. The Florida Fossils: Evolution of Life and Land exhibit is a $2.5 million journey through five geologic epochs, starting when the Florida platform lay entirely underwater during the Eocene. Visitors walk forward through the Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene, encounter...

Image: Wtc69789 | Public domain

Florida Museum of Natural History: The Vaults Behind the Walls

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. The public galleries are just the visible edge. Dickinson Hall, the museum's main research facility on the east side of campus, contains over 25 million objects across collections in ichthyology, paleontology, botany, herpetology, malacology, mammalogy, ornithology, and archaeolo...

Image: Ebyabe | CC BY 2.5

Florida Museum of Natural History: Twelve Thousand Years of Florida's People

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shoffman11, Public domain. The museum's archaeological holdings span 12,000 years of human presence in the Southeast. The South Florida People and Environments exhibit recreates a Calusa fishing village as it may have appeared 500 years ago, complete with a young boy carrying a shark over his shoulder. Vis...

Image: Shoffman11 | Public domain

Florida Museum of Natural History: Still Growing

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Rivera, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum received $8 million in annual research revenue in 2024, and its collections continue to expand. The vertebrate paleontology holdings alone number roughly 400,000 specimens, ranking in the top five nationally. The mollusk collection has grown from 22,174 lots in 1973 to...

Image: Michael Rivera | CC BY-SA 4.0