As I am getting ready for STEAM Night at Lawton Chiles Elementary School, I am faced with a familiar conundrum: what do I wear that will make me look professional and scientist-like and also fun and approachable? Which begs the question, „What DOES a scientist look like?“ I settle on a blue dress
contain their excitement with popsicle sticks in hand
Lepidoptera species generally have different wing patterns which help identify them. Nevertheless, look-alikes and plain colored species can be a challenge, especially with tiny moths. Long before DNA barcoding became a popular identification tool, Lepidopterists relied on what is still the inexpens
tool which does not require much more than a steady hand
Just as a butterfly leaves the chrysalis to spread its wings, in May 2007 the Butterfly Conservation Initiative decided to make a move that would allow the organization to take flight. Armed with resources that would allow the program to expand, Stephanie Sanchez was named program coordin
an opportunity to see conservation efforts first-hand
Just as a butterfly leaves the chrysalis to spread its wings, in May 2007 the Butterfly Conservation Initiative decided to make a move that would allow the organization to take flight. Armed with resources that would allow the program to expand, Stephanie Sanchez was named program coordin
an opportunity to see conservation efforts first-hand
Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antón de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. The Spanish fort was built in 1566 in the capital of the Calusa, the most powerful Native American tribe in the region, on present-day Mound Key in
from top left, an olive jar, various ceramics and a hand-wrought
Early in the 1970s, a paleontologist working on the outskirts of an Indian village found small, bead-like fossils embedded in the gray chert dotting the surrounding fields. The site was notorious for turning up plant fossils that were difficult to identify, including the fruit of an extinct species
to recognize them, but with the material we had on hand
With an area about the size of Arizona, Ecuador seems small when compared to other South American countries, such as Argentina or Brazil. But what it lacks in land, it makes up in biodiversity. Deemed one of 17 “megadiverse” countries by Conservation International, Ecuador has the highest con
Ecuador, Endara has witnessed species loss first-hand
The Calusa may have been the only ancient people in North America who established a kingdom without practicing agriculture. Their sophistication and fierceness enabled them to resist Spanish domination for some 200 years. The Calusa king Caalus, perched high on his throne in his grand house, watc
types of Spanish artifacts such as majolica ceramics, hand-wrought
When most people hear the words Guantanamo Bay, they immediately think of the infamous prison built there in 2001. But for Roger Portell, an invertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Guantanamo means the chance to collect marine fossils on an island that is otherwise larg
The younger terrace fossils, on the other hand, look
Brazilian free-tailed bats are expert flyers, capable of migrating hundreds of miles and regularly traveling more than 30 miles a night. But they pull up short at a narrow ocean channel that cuts across the Bahamas, dividing bat populations that last shared an ancestor hundreds of thousands of years
suddenly had dozens of free-tailed bat specimens at hand
