Florida Museum of Natural History

The Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville is the largest natural history museum in the southeastern United States, housing over 40 million specimens and artifacts across paleontology, geology, biology, and anthropology. The museum occupies a purpose-built facility at the Cultural Plaza adjacent to the UF campus, providing large-scale gallery spaces for both permanent exhibitions and rotating shows. The Butterfly Rainforest is the museum's most celebrated attraction — a 6,400-square-foot enclosed tropical butterfly garden containing up to 80 species of free-flying butterflies from the Americas and the tropics, with thousands of individual butterflies feeding from flowering plants and native habitats throughout the enclosure. Visitors walk through the enclosure at leisure with butterflies landing freely on clothing and skin, creating an extraordinary intimacy with species from iridescent blue morphos to large owl butterflies. The museum's fossil galleries trace Florida's paleontological history with exceptional specimens including a giant prehistoric whale recovered from Sarasota County, a Florida spectacled bear, a giant ground sloth, and a spectacular mastodon skeleton. The Northwest Florida: Waterways and Wildlife gallery presents the ecology of the state's panhandle rivers and springs system. The Florida Fossils: Evolution of Life and Land gallery provides comprehensive geological context for Florida's formation and the extraordinary diversity of prehistoric life that once occupied the peninsula. The Culture and Nature of the Ancient Americas gallery explores pre-Columbian Florida through a remarkable collection of artifacts from the Calusa, Timucua, and other indigenous peoples of the region.