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The Florida Museum of Natural History  The Florida Museum of Natural History is one of the nation’s top 10 museums with more than 28 million specimens, including one of the world’s largest collections of butterflies and moths. Visitors can enjoy hundreds of exotic, live butterflies in the award-winning Butterfly Rainforest, witness a South Florida Calusa Indian welcoming ceremony, experience a life-sized limestone cave and see a mammoth and mastodon from the last Ice Age.
The museum is located on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville near the intersection of Southwest 34th Street and Hull Road, and open year-round except Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Florida Museum is home to the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, the world’s largest facility dedicated to research and education about butterflies, moths and global biodiversity. In addition to the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit, inside the McGuire Center, visitors may view more than 13,000 scanned and actual Lepidoptera specimens on the “Wall of Wings” and learn about butterfly and moth biology. See scientists working in laboratories, preparing specimens and rearing new butterflies. Butterfly Rainforest admission is $9.50 for adults ($8 Fla. Residents), and $5 for ages 3-12.
Other permanent exhibits include:
Hall of Florida Fossils: Evolution of Life and Land
Drawing upon the Florida Museum’s internationally acclaimed fossil collections, this award-winning exhibit describes the last 65 million years of Florida’s history. Walk through time beginning with the Eocene, when Florida was underwater, to the Pleistocene when the first humans arrived 14,000 years ago. 
South Florida People and Environments
This exhibit celebrates the story of native people in South Florida and the environments that have supported them. Walk along a boardwalk through a mangrove forest, travel underwater to view larger-than-life marine creatures, and visit the house of a Calusa leader.
Northwest Florida: Waterways and Wildlife
Follow water as it flows through the unique environments of northwest Florida, the most biodiverse region of the state. Explore a hardwood hammock featuring a life-sized limestone cave, a seepage bog with its carnivorous plants, a Native American trading scene and more.
 Outside exhibits include the Fossil Plant Garden, located south of the museum entrance and landscaped with modern species of plants whose ancestors lived millions of ears ago, and the Florida Wildflower and Butterfly Garden, located just west of the museum, which showcases Florida’s native wildflowers and their importance as host and nectar plants for Florida’s native butterflies.
Admission to the Florida Museum’s permanent exhibits is free. In addition to permanent exhibits, the museum hosts a variety of temporary exhibits throughout the year. Upcoming exhibits include “Amazon Voyage: Vicious Fishes and Other Riches,” from Oct. 3 through Jan. 17, 2010, where guests can visit seven ports of call along the most biologically diverse river in the world. Encounter amazing creatures including notorious piranhas, enormous anacondas, beautiful stingrays and mysterious pink dolphins. Admission for Amazon Voyage is $8 for adults ($7 Fla. residents), and $5.50 for ages 3-12. Combo rate tickets for the Amazon Voyage and Butterfly Rainforest exhibits are available.
For more information, visit www.flmnh.ufl.edu or call 352-846-2000.
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