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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 19h

Museum Resource 🌍 UF Thompson Earth Systems Institute

TESI advances communication and education about Earth systems science in a way that inspires Floridians to be effective stewards of our planet. Meet the '25 TESI Team & learn about what they do:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/earth-system...

a group six young women are posed for a group shot in a sunny park-like area

an instructor stands at the front of small college classroom speaking to adult students about science communication as indicated by the slide on the screen to her side

One person stands and several sit behind a table in a public space that displays many small information signs and cards while students are sitting at work stations in the background in what looks like a library

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 1d

Name a bat 🦇🦇🦇 this #SpookySeason!

@ufl.edu is home to one of the world’s largest occupied bat abodes and you can name a UF bat by making a gift to any area on campus (including the bat houses and your favorite museum) before October 31.
🦇 Find out how: affinitygiving.ufl.edu/campaigns/na...

a cartoon image of a bat with a speech bubble that says My Name's Squeaks! What's yours?

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 5d

Spooky natural history 👾 Columned stinkhorn

At the top of its stalks, the stinkhorn produces a slimy mass of spores. The smell may be repugnant to humans but it’s irresistible to some insects and other invertebrates. Read more: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/spoo...
📷 Alex Abair, CC BY-NC

an oblong column is a swirl of reddish fungus tissue emerging from mulchy leaves

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 8d

Low nitrogen availability is the number-one limitation to plant growth in most ecosystems, including farmland. A new study brings scientists a step closer to engineering plants that can pull nitrogen from the air.

Story:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/some...

Study:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

a cluster of stubby roots seem to have thick, lighter red-brown branches at the ends, almost like coral, dusted with sandy soil against a black background

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 9d

Ancient, diverse and abundant 🌏 Scientists created a global dataset of brittle star occurrences and combined this with DNA analyses to determined how brittle star species are related and how they dispersed across the world's oceans.

Story:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/no-e...

No eyes, no brain, no problem: Brittle stars have traveled the world over, and scientists have figured out how

A ncient, gangly cousins of sea stars, brittle stars crawl the seafloor on five flexible arms, which in some cases measure 2 feet long and can be shed and regrown at will. With no eyes, heart or brain...

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 13d

Work with us! 👉 Florida Museum Registrar
The Registrar oversees the technical and regulatory aspects of collection accessions, permitting, and exchanges.

🔸 Full position info: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/nhdept/caree...

🔸 Apply via UF: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

🏛️📌 Apply by Oct 31, 2025

two people are sitting at a work station in a storage room looking at ceramics pieces and cataloging them on paper and into a computer

a person is leaning over a drawer in a cabinet full of shallow drawers full of tiny boxes of small fossils in a collections room of some kind

a person is standing on a narrow library corridor looking through a card catalog on one side and holing open drawers full of short planks of wood

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 14d

Work with us! 👉 NAGPRA Bioarchaeologist and Coordinator
This is a this full-time, TEAMS exempt staff position.
🏛️📌 Apply by Oct 31, 2025

🔸 Full position info: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/nhdept/caree...

🔸 Apply via @ufl.edu: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

the front of a low, long building with steep earthen walls and a shallow metal roof has a simple portico that reaches out to the street in front and two rows of four flag poles on either side

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 14d

Museum Resource 🐟 Fishes in the Fresh Waters of Florida
Explore our state's freshwater fish species and click through to our collection records, photos & map.
Shown: Jack Dempsey (Rocio octofasciata), non-indigenous to Florida's freshwaters
🔗 Info & browse:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/discover-fis...

two specimens of a large almond-shaped fish with many iridescent spots on their bodies and serrated fins. The top fish is larger and darker colored while the bottom one is light with more noticeable dark vertical bars

a screenshot showing search criteria fields down the left side of a map of Florida with red pins along Florida's east coast and a cluster around Tampa and a few scattered across the state

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 16d

Sept 27 🐦 Early Bird Gets the Band
Learn about bird banding during fieldwork with Museum ornithologist Glaucia Del-Rio and the UF Bird Observatory’s Charlie Muise, including demonstrations of bird capturing, data collection and banding.

Event info:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/event/early-...

a small brownish bird is siting on a bare twig against a background of more bare twigs in a bush

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 19d

“These butterflies have puzzled and exasperated lepidopterists, taxonomists and museum curators for centuries, including me personally for the last three decades,” said Keith Willmott, curator at our McGuire Center for Lepidoptera & Biodiversity.

🦋🧬 Story:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/geno...

a thin butterfly with black and orange patterns on its long, lobed wings is at rest on the shiny surface of a leaf next to what might be small eggs

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 20d

Museum Collections 🐈 Fossil Meow
Jaguars first dispersed to North America across the Bering Land Bridge in the Pleistocene and were much larger than those living today in Central and South America. More:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-vert...

Featured
Species: Panthera onca
Specimen: # UF 14765

a dark jaw bone seems to be a fossil from a big cat with several sharp molars and a sturdy hooked canine in place shot next to a ruler

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 21d

Online Exhibit 🐟 Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating

Feature: Fishing Net Fragments
From Collier Co., Florida
Dates to ~AD 700-1500

"It’s well over 1,000 years old, yet you can still see the knots in the net and tell how they were tied."
🎧 With Bill Marquardt: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/100-years/ob...

close up of a twisted and knotted fishing net made of dark fiber and pinned to a white background

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 22d

The study authors said their results are a milestone, but not one to stop at. Rather, they see the model as a tool that can be further refined and added to.
Study: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🦟📉 @alexbaecher.bsky.social

Toward ecological forecasting of West Nile virus in Florida: Insights from two decades of sentinel chicken surveillance

West Nile Virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the United States, yet transmission activity remains difficult to predict. The…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 22d

Sentinel chickens, mosquito-borne illnesses and an informatics pipeline 🐓 Collaboration under a @ufl.edu Research Opportunity Seed Fund brings clarity to decades of data on Florida's West Nile outbreaks and forecasting. Story:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/dise...

Close up on the very red flesh of a chicken face with a mosquito feeding on the forehead above the large yellow eye

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 22d

Museum Collections 🧺 Seminole and Miccosukee Baskets

Baskets are made from material like cane, palmetto, palm leaves, and sweetgrass and includes pack, envelope, berry, sieve, and coiled sweetgrass baskets.

The collection covers 150 years of history:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/sflarch/ethn...

a grid of photos of different styles and shapes of woven baskets from bowls to long tubes to classic vase shapes, some with colorful thread as binding

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 23d

#ICYMI 🦈 🧬 What is going on with great white shark DNA?
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/ther...

White sharks exhibit stark differences between the DNA in their nuclei and the DNA in their mitochondria. Until now, scientists believed their migration patterns explained this discrepancy.

There’s something fishy going on with great white sharks that scientists can’t explain

Key points White sharks exhibit stark differences between the DNA in their nuclei and the DNA in their mitochondria. Until now, scientists have pointed to the migration patterns of great whites to explain the discrepancy. Scientists tested this theory in a new study by analyzing genetic diff

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 27d

#TBT From the Archives 💡 Dave Webb and the Giant Ground Sloths

The beloved giant ground sloth fossils featured in our Florida Fossils exhibit are the result of paleontologist Dave Webb's research and the work he and his students put into the specimens:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/vertpaleo/bl...

an old black and white photo of a man standing with arms raised dramatically to mimic the large skeleton he is standing next to that is a large mammal that also has its clawed arms raised

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 28d

Gustav Paulay: “It’s essential to zoom out. When focusing on something so little, you can lose context in which you operate in. And often the context changes what you perceive to be going on.” These efforts often spark unexpected collaborations.

Study: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spatiotemporal faunal connectivity across global sea floors - Nature

We analyse a global dataset of genomic DNA sequences for Ophiuroidea to gain an understanding of phylogenetic divergence and biotic movement across oceans, finding phylogentically divergent faunas at ...

www.nature.com

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 28d

The new brittle star dataset is the most complete for any group of marine organisms. By combining this with DNA analyses, the team has determined how brittle star species are related and how they dispersed across the world's oceans.
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/no-e...

No eyes, no brain, no problem: Brittle stars have traveled the world over, and scientists have figured out how

A ncient, gangly cousins of sea stars, brittle stars crawl the seafloor on five flexible arms, which in some cases measure 2 feet long and can be shed and regrown at will. With no eyes, heart or brain...

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 28d

They don't have eyes, a heart or a brain, and they once nearly went extinct, but that hasn't stopped brittle stars from getting around. An international team of scientists have created a global dataset of brittle star occurrences. 🧵
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/no-e...

a sea creature seems to resemble a starfish but it has a small body with five very long squiggly arms that loop and curl like worms and are covered in rows of soft bristles

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · 29d

Museum Collections 🦋 Butterfly Moths

The McGuire Center has been working on digitizing their sizeable Castniidae collection -- a family of diverse, tropical moths that are brightly patterned with colorful hindwings:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/mcguire/news...

a large brown butterfly or moth with big patches of rich blue and crescents of orange on its back wings is preserved on a card next to a ruler and color palette

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · Sep 8

#ICYMI 🐚 Paleontologists Carrie Tyler and Michal Kowalewski created a massive dataset of marine fossils to demonstrate for the first time that functional diversity can be accurately inferred from the marine fossil record.

What is functional diversity?
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/pale...

close up on dozens of wet shells and varying sizes of shell fragments are mixed together

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · Sep 5

Now a postdoc researcher in the @artporto.bsky.social lab / Florida Museum, he will transition to U. of Bonn @unibonn.bsky.social next spring!

His goal is to create a comprehensive database of the wing color patterns for all the major groups of Lepidoptera.
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/mori...

Moritz Lürig receives funding to create a digital atlas of butterflies and moths

Leaf-shaped wings in the delicate yellow-green of the brimstone butterfly; brown wings with spots that resemble eyes and scare off predators, like in the owl butterfly; or shimmering wings in green, b...

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · Sep 5

Congrats to Moritz Lürig @mluerig.bsky.social! 👏👏👏 He has been awarded a group starter grant by the European Research Council @erc.europa.eu to create an atlas for moth and butterfly wing patterns using machine learning.
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/mori...
🧵

portrait photo of a person with long hair brushing the shoulders of a colorful button down shirt and a moderately sized mustache smiling confidently at the camera

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Florida Museum of Natural History @floridamuseum.bsky.social · Sep 4

Carrie Tyler (@unlv.edu) and Michal Kowalewski (Florida Museum) constructed and analyzed a massive dataset of marine fossils to demonstrated for the first time that functional diversity can be accurately inferred from the marine fossil record.
Study: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

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