Tags: Museum News

  Dr. Doug Booher, a collection associate with the Museum's Arthropod Collection is the lead author on the paper "Functional innovation promotes diversification of form in the evolution of an ultrafast trap-jaw mechanism in ants" just published in PLOS Biology. The article is available freely from this weblink http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001031. Dr. Booher spent many an hour working…

Executive Director Dr. Victor Thompson and Zooarchaeology Curator Dr. Elizabeth Reitz have both been featured in this spring's edition of American Archaeology Magazine. Dr. Thompson, co-author of a 2024 study that showed that rising sea levels are threatening 4,200 known archaeological sites in Georgia alone. One such site is a 5,000-year-old shell mound on Ossabaw Island, one of the oldest Native American-made structures on the coast.…

In October 2024, Genevieve Guzmán’s ENGL 4800W: Intermediate Fiction Writing class visited our on-campus museum gallery. The group got a tour of the exhibit and a behind-the-scenes look at the bird research collection, then stayed on site to start drafting. Their prompt was to write either a quest story with museum objects or an outdoor survival scenario set in the region. Owls were their favorite subject, but they also wrote about escaping…

by Christa May, GMNH Student Association President On October 18, 2024, Dr. James W. Porter and the Georgia Museum of Natural History amazed Odum with their display of tropical corals and their history. Originally, they were held in the UGA Special Collections Museum alongside rare books describing their oddity. While the books were the objects of focus, the corals provided evidence of how naturalists have captured their beauty. Now, UGA…

David and Dorinda Dallmeyer have had a lifelong love of natural history museums. During David’s childhood he lived in Chicago and took in the wonders at the Field Museum. Of particular interest for a budding geologist was Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Its life-size replica of a coal mine — complete with an elevator ride down to the coal seam — still dazzles visitors.  For Dorinda, growing up in Macon, Georgia…

We are excited to announce that Richard Hoebeke, Arthropod Collection Associate Curator and Collections Manager has published the manual Adventive Weevils Recorded from North America: A Review and Illustrated Manual for their Identification with colleagues James R. LaBonte and Kent E. Loeffler. While a portion of Hoebeke's current research includes taxonomic studies of beetles of the megadiverse families Staphylinidae and Curculionidae, his…

On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Mary Freeman was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southeastern Fishes Council. Her immense contributions to the research and understanding of freshwater fish populations in the Southeast spans four decades, and her work has helped to conserve the region's natural biodiversity for generations to come. Read the Southeastern Fishes Council's official statement: "To know Dr. Mary Freeman is to know…

UPDATE: Due to Hurricane Helene, this opening has been rescheduled for Friday, October 18 at 10 am Join us this Friday, September 27th at 10 AM for the grand opening of Corals from the Georgia Museum of Natural History in the Odum School of Ecology foyer! The exhibition has been curated by Dr. James W Porter, Curator of Marine Invertebrates and Meigs Professor of Ecology, Emeritus. Continental breakfast will be served from 10-11 AM, and the…

Larissa McPherson is a Master of Fine Arts student in jewelry and metalwork at UGA. During Fall 2024 semester, she is participating in a directed study with the Georgia Museum of Natural History under the supervision of her graduate adviser, Demi Thomloudis, and GMNH collection manager, Nicole Pontzer. Her directed study with the museum is an exciting example of the creative and cross-disciplinary possibilities available at UGA. We recently…

The Georgia Museum of Natural History has had an active and full schedule of tours this semester! In fact, the Museum reached capacity for our Fall 2023 tour calendar and has begun scheduling tours for Spring semester 2024. Since the start of Fall semester, the Museum has hosted 22 different tour groups at both our campus gallery and our off-campus curation annex. The tours this Fall have included various school groups from elementary to high…