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.

There are live butterfly releases every weekday at 2 p.m.[8] Located in Powell Hall, the $2.5 million, 5,000-square-foot (460 m2) exhibit describes the history of the Florida Platform through five geologic time periods.

The exhibition begins with five extinction events described in dioramas that lead visitors onto the Florida Platform at about 66 million years ago, also known as the Dawn of the Age of Mammals.

Displays include a primitive-toothed whale in the Eocene, a pig-like, extinct mammal from the Oligocene, a Miocene rhinoceros being attacked by two saber-toothed, cat-like animals, a 15-foot (4.6 m)-tall sloth standing on its hind legs in the Pliocene area and a 500,000-year-old jaguar chasing a peccary from the Pleistocene epoch.

Artifacts from the museum's collections complement the stories and include shell, bone, and metal ornaments as well as objects traded to the Calusa from places as far away as Missouri.

Display cases feature many of the interesting objects from the museum's collections, including patchwork clothing, woodwork, basketry, silverwork, and artifacts from early Seminole sites.

Northwest Florida rivers are filled with fossilized remains of now-extinct vertebrate animal species, and examples of these are featured in this exhibit along with many archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from the museum's collections.

The final exhibit in this section is a floor-to-ceiling curved lagoon case, depicting how different sessile intertidal species stratify their habitats in the tidal zone.

Most of the material acquired from the National Marine Fisheries Service Tropical Atlantic Biological (TABL) collection consists of western Atlantic fishes from nearshore shallows to moderate depths, with the families Argentinidae, Atherinidae, Balistidae, Batrachoididae, Belonidae, Bothidae, Branchiostomatidae, Caproidae, Carangidae, Clupeidae, Congridae, Cynoglossidae, Dasyatidae, Engraulididae, Exocoetidae, Fundulidae, Gadidae, Gerreidae, Haemulidae, Hemiramphidae, Lutjanidae, Macrouridae, Monacanthidae, Mugilidae, Ogcocephalidae, Ophichthidae, Ophidiidae, Paralichthyidae, Peristediidae, Priacanthidae, Rajidae, Sciaenidae, Scombridae, Serranidae, Scorpaenidae, Scyliorhinidae, Soleidae, Sparidae, Sphyraenidae, Stromateidae, Squalidae, Syngnathidae, Synodontidae, Tetraodontidae, and Triglidae most common.

The western Atlantic collections acquired from the National Marine Fisheries Service Pascagoula laboratory and University of Miami are generally from greater depths and represent some of the museum's most valuable resources.

Major reef groups represented include the Acanthuridae, Antennariidae, Apogonidae, Blenniidae, Chaenopsidae, Chaetodontidae, Clinidae, Dactyloscopidae, Gobiesocidae, Gobiidae, Grammistidae, Haemulidae, Holocentridae, Kyphosidae, Labridae, Lutjanidae, Mullidae, Muraenidae, Ostraciidae, Opistognathidae, Pomacanthidae, Pomacentridae, Scaridae, Serranidae, and Tripterygiidae.

Other elasmobranch groups prominently represented include Carcharhinidae, Dasyatidae, Gymnuridae, Myliobatidae, Rajidae, Rhinobatidae, Scyliorhinidae, Sphyrnidae, Squatinidae, Torpedinidae and Triakidae.

Freshwater fishes from Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Hispaniola, Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica are currently represented in moderate to large numbers in the collection.

A wide spectrum of characoid, gymnotoid and siluroid families, cichlids, and poeciliids are especially well represented The mollusk collection was initiated through the efforts of T. van Hyning, the first director of the museum, and was small and composed mostly of local taxa until 1965.

The botany collection is an excellent representation of the vascular flora of Florida and the southeastern United States coastal plain, including abundant material from the 19th century.

Sizable collections of Kinosternid turtles were donated by John Iverson, softshells by Peter Meylan, and Panama amphibians and reptiles by the late Howard W. Campbell.

Samuel R. Telford, Jr., provided extensive collections from Japan, Burma, Panama, Venezuela, Tanzania, and Pakistan, and smaller numbers from Zaire, Thailand and the Philippines.

A particular strength of the UF collection is the extraordinary array of land-animals from the past 25 million years in Florida, forming the best record documenting the evolution of ancient vertebrate life in eastern North America over this interval.

On-going field work begun by our new curator Jonathan Bloch in 2004 will over time produce a significant collection of Paleocene and early Eocene vertebrates from basins in Wyoming and Montana.

World-renowned paleontologists such as George G. Simpson, Edwin H. Colbert, and Henry F. Osborn wrote scientific papers about specimens in the FGS collection in addition to Sellards and Olsen.

In 1976 the entire FGS fossil vertebrate collection was transferred to the Florida Museum of Natural History with support from a National Science Foundation grant.

Since 1987, research teams from the museum have undertaken surveys and excavations in Antigua, the Bahamas, Grand Cayman, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Analysis of physical and mineralogical properties of the pottery are undertaken to provide precise data to address research questions regarding chronology, provenience or manufacturing origins, processes of production, culture change, and the development of social and economic complexity in prehistoric Florida, the Southeastern US, and the Caribbean Basin.

The collection contains prehistoric lithic, bone and mammoth ivory tools, ceramics, historic materials, plant remains, and Pleistocene and Holocene fossils from assorted sites along the Aucilla River.

Notable items in this collection include the fossilized bones of Pleistocene animals exhibiting butcher and cut marks, numerous stone Paleoindian projectile points, and carved ivory shafts.

Pottery types span the entire range of ceramic periods in the area: Orange, Transitional, Deptford, Weeden Island, St. Johns, and Alachua.

The six surveys identified or revisited over 750 archaeological sites in 15 counties (Alachua, Baker, Bradford, Citrus, Clay, Columbia, Gilchrist, Lafayette, Madison, Marion, Putnam, Sumter, Suwannee, and Union).

The collections include Safety Harbor ceramic vessels, Pinellas points and other lithic tools, and many shell artifacts: gorget, celt, dippers, and beads.

His collaborations with such researchers as Emile Boyrie of the Dominican Republic, José Cruxent of Venezuela and Irving Rouse of Yale additionally resulted in the exchange of smaller comparative collections from throughout the region.

Excavations in Haiti conducted by Charles Fairbanks and Kathleen Deagan between 1979 and 1988 also generated two large Historic-era collections that are being curated at the Florida Museum of Natural History on behalf of the Haitian government.