The Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) is Florida's official state-sponsored and chartered natural-history museum. Its main facilities are located at 3215 Hull Road on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville.The main public exhibit facility, Powell Hall and the attached McGuire Center, is located in the Cultural Plaza, which it shares with the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art and the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. The main research facility and former public exhibits building, Dickinson Hall, is located on the east side of campus at the corner of Museum Road and Newell Drive. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida chapter placed Dickinson Hall on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Florida Museum of Natural History / Formerly Florida Museum of Natural Sciences.Powell Hall's permanent public exhibits focus on the flora, fauna, fossils, and historic peoples of the state of Florida. The museum does not charge for admission to most exhibits; the exceptions are the Butterfly Rainforest and certain traveling exhibits.The museum's collections were first used for teaching at Florida Agriculture College in Lake City in the 1800s, and were relocated to the campus of the University of Florida in 1906. The museum was chartered as the state's official natural history museum by the Florida Legislature in 1917. Formerly known as the Florida State Museum, the name was changed in 1988 to more accurately reflect the museum's mission and help avoid confusion with Florida State University, which is located in Tallahassee.The Florida Museum of Natural History partnered with the Alachua County Library to help provide zoom events, virtual tours, and online exhibits so that visitors can stay involved despite the changes the library has endured due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sloths (Folivora) display remarkable morphological diversity yet share a highly conserved dental formula, whose occasional deviations offer key insights into their evolutionary history. Among nothrotheriids, Neogene species retained upper and lower caniniforms, whereas these teeth were lost in Pleistocene genera. Here we describe, for the first time, a poorly developed alveolus interpreted as an atavistic upper caniniform alveolus in an individual of Nothrotherium maquinense from the Late Pleistocene of Bahia, Brazil. Computed tomography and X-ray imaging confirm its internal anatomy and rule out taphonomic or pathological origins. The alveolus occupies the precise position of the caniniform in Neogene nothrotheriids and exhibits similar morphology, suggesting a partial re-expression of a lost ancestral trait. Beyond its developmental implications, this observation may offer additional context for interpreting the taxonomy of Nothropus, traditionally defined based on the presence of a lower caniniform alveolus. The occurrence of similar atavistic structures in related taxa indicates that this feature alone may be insufficient for diagnosis and warrants reevaluation within a broader evolutionary framework.
Carcharhinus galapagensis and Carcharhinus obscurus are challenging species to distinguish based on their physical characteristics, particularly after processing, which can hinder species-level monitoring in fisheries and conservation programs. In this study, we utilized diagnostic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to identify 17 shark specimens collected from the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago in Brazil, a remote marine protected area in the equatorial Atlantic. Our analysis confirmed the presence of both species: nine individuals were identified as C. galapagensis, seven as C. obscurus, and one was classified as a putative hybrid. We also developed a cost-effective, high-throughput SNP-based method for accurate species identification. This new tool enhances the precision of species identification in both fisheries-dependent and independent data, facilitating better management and conservation efforts for these ecologically important sharks.
BACKGROUND AND AIMS:Eocene foliage formerly attributed to the extant araliaceous genus Oreopanax was found attached to twigs bearing inflorescences and infructescences unlike those of Araliaceae. Using newly observable characters of phyllotaxy, vegetative and floral buds, infructescences and seeds, we sought to reassess the affinities of this strange angiosperm. METHODS:Fossils were studied from the Parachute Creek Member of the Green River Formation from near Bonanza, Utah and Douglas Pass, Colorado (~47 Mya). Macrofossil impression remains were investigated by low-angle reflected light, and subtle details of the vegetative and floral buds, stamens, mature fruits and seeds were revealed by optical shadow effect microscopy, documenting previously obscure topographic surface features. KEY RESULTS:Othniophyton elongatum (MacGinitie) Manchester, Judd, Correa-Narvaez gen. et comb. nov. has simple, short-petiolate, elongate, entire-margined leaves with thick midveins, pinnate, brochidodromous secondaries, common intersecondary veins and finely reticulate higher-order venation. Inflorescences are small axillary cymes; flower buds are subglobose and pedicellate, in bract axils. The flowers are actinomorphic, bisexual, with approximately five imbricate perianth parts, ~24 stamens with elongate anthers and short filaments, arising from a hypanthium. The whorl of stamens persists to fruiting stage. The ovary is superior, with probable basal placentation and five stigmatic arms. Fruits are pedicellate berries with a cup-shaped hypanthium and contain ~15 lensoidal reniform seeds, each with a curved embryo and ornamented with concentric ridges. The combined characters refute the prior placement in Araliaceae and rule out affinities with most extant clades of angiosperms. CONCLUSIONS:The distinctive combination of observed features does not coincide with any extant family. Among extant orders of Eudicots, the fossil seems to conform most closely to the order Caryophyllales, but key differences remain. This example indicates that the vegetation of ~47 Mya included some taxa that cannot readily be placed in modern families and genera.
Quantifying biodiversity is challenging when morphology is conserved in taxa with extensive geographic distributions generated in part by human activities. Shipworms, xylophagous wood-boring clams, have been dispersed throughout the world's oceans by wooden vessels, aquaculture equipment, and in ballast water. Consequently, many species are considered cosmopolitan, with their geographic origin obscured by their extensive distribution. Several cryptic species pairs possessing different reproductive modes are known in the Teredinidae. However, the genetic, ecological, and geographic relationships within these pairs remain unexplored. Members of the Lyrodus pedicellatus complex, both long- and short-term brooders, are found on coastlines of five continents. Phylogenetic, anatomical, ecological, and geographic data were collected on shipworms extracted from test panels, fixed submerged natural wood and driftwood, from multiple locations, primarily in the Hawaiian Archipelago, a center of wooden vessel traffic since the 1400s. Phylogenetic analysis, using multiple loci of L. pedicellatus from Hawai'i, Europe, the Mediterranean, Japan, Florida (USA), and California (USA), revealed seven genetically distinct cryptic species comprised of short- and long-term brooders. Reproductive mode was determined to be an inherited trait within the species in this study. Herein we discuss these findings and describe a new member of this complex, Lyrodus reginae sp. nov., from Hawai'i. Historically, L. pedicellatus was considered a cosmopolitan species. Our integrative approach reveals a more complicated story, indicating the evolution of multiple cryptic species with different reproductive strategies.
Premise Herbarium specimens represent critical historical records of plant phenology, yet automating annotation of reproductive structures remains challenging given the diversity of floral morphologies, specimen age and quality, and image quality.Methods Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that uses an ensemble modeling approach to detect flowers on herbarium specimens and deliver these data to the phenology research community. After testing multiple strategies for generating training data, we found that in-house expert-curated annotations were essential for producing reliable results.Results Expert validation found that the modeling pipeline detected present floral structures with relatively strong accuracy but had moderately high false negative rates. Applying the ensemble to our filtered final image dataset of 22 million records resulted in 11.1 million records labeled with flowers present. However, only 2.9 million of these contained the complete metadata necessary for downstream phenology research, highlighting the need for full label digitization efforts.Discussion The dataset presented here represents a large compilation of historical herbarium-derived phenology records available as a resource for the phenology community. We end by demonstrating how integrating these machine-labeled records into Phenobase, a publicly available phenology database, expands taxonomic and temporal coverage for large-scale phenological analyses.
