[By Paul Ramey · Photographs courtesy Florida Museum of Natural History.]

Florida Museum of Natural History - A worldwide resource

The Florida Museum of Natural History offers guests a place where beauty and excitement meet science and creativity. Since the late 1800s, the Florida Museum has been dedicated to understanding and preserving biological diversity and cultural heritage. For more than 100 years, museum faculty and staff have engaged in the study and research of the natural world, sharing their exciting discoveries with the public through -temporary and permanent exhibits, popular public and education programs, and a world-renowned collection that contains more than 20 million specimens and artifacts from around the globe. Located in the University of Florida's Cultural Plaza in Gainesville, the Florida Museum is the largest collections-based natural history museum in the Southeast, with one of the nation's top ten natural history collections.

Visitors enjoy four diverse permanent exhibitions, a temporary exhibit gallery, and gallery space for innovative education and public programs and events. A research center dedicated solely to Lepidoptera is housed in the museum. Dickinson Hall, near the center of main campus, is a highly regarded scientific resource for researchers worldwide, and current home to most of the museum's faculty, research activities and collections. Future plans include relocation of the Dickinson Hall faculty and collections into an expanded museum building in the UF Cultural Plaza. The Florida Museum welcomes about 200, 000 visitors and serves nearly 150,000 people through its educational outreach programs each year.

Humble Beginnings
The Florida Museum of Natural History got its start in 1891 when Frank Pickel, a professor of natural science at Florida Agriculture College in Lake City, purchased research collections of minerals, fossils and human anatomy models to use as teaching aids. The museum became part of the newly created University of Florida and was moved to Gainesville in 1906, where the collections expanded in size and scope and were displayed for some time in the Thomas Hall dormitory, and later in the basement of UF's sciences building, Flint Hall.

T.H. Van Hyning was appointed the Florida Museum's first director in 1914 and ran the museum virtually unassisted for 29 years. Van Hyning spearheaded the effort to designate the Florida State Museum at the University of Florida as the state's official natural history museum in 1917. In 1937, the museum exhibits were moved to the Seagle Building in downtown Gainesville where they remained for more than 30 years. In 1953, the museum developed its first traveling exhibit a panoramic survey of Florida history beginning with the state's earliest inhabitants.

In 1970, the museum moved into Dickinson Hall, a new building on campus, and later acquired the 9,000-acre Katharine Ordway Preserve in Putnam County, the 56-acre Randell Research Center, an internationally significant archaeological site near Ft. Myers, and the Allyn Museum of Entomology in Sarasota. With the Allyn Museum addition, the museum received the largest butterfly collection in the Western Hemisphere and gained two curators of Lepidoptera, all now located in Gainesville at the museum's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.

In 1988, the Florida State Museum was renamed The Florida Museum of Natural History. Douglas S. Jones became director in 1997, and in January 1998, Powell Hall opened to the public. The new 55,000-square-foot education and exhibition center joins the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art and the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts to complete the UF Cultural Plaza on the western edge of campus.

Today visitors can enjoy four permanent exhibition halls: