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The Florida Geological Survey Digital Collection includes historic resources from the Florida Geological Survey (FGS). FGS is an Office which reports directly to the Deputy Secretary for Land & Recreation in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The mission of the FGS is to collect, interpret, disseminate, store and maintain geologic data, thereby contributing to the responsible use and understanding of Florida’s natural resources, and to conserve the State of Florida’s oil and gas resources and minimize environmental impacts from exploration and production operations.
Historic resources from the Florida Geological Survey Digital Collection includes historic FGS:
For a list of all publications, historic through current, see the FGS website.
Florida Geological Survey Fossil Collection in the Florida Museum of Natural History
The Florida Geological Survey fossil vertebrate collection (FGS) was started during the 1910s and was originally housed in Tallahassee. Under the direction of E. H. Sellards, Herman Gunter, and S. J. Olsen, the FGS collection was the primary source of fossil vertebrate descriptions from Florida until the early 1960s. World-renown 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. The UF/FGS collection is composed of about 22,000 specimens assigned to about 10,000 catalogue numbers, and almost all of them were collected in Florida. The majority of specimens in the UF/FGS collection are mammals, followed by reptiles, birds, and a relatively small number of amphibians and fish. Although there are some sites that are unique to the UF/FGS collection, many of the sites overlap with holdings in the main UF and UF/PB collections. The major strengths of the UF/FGS collection are historically important samples from the early Miocene Thomas Farm locality, the middle Miocene and early Pliocene deposits of the Bone Valley Region, Polk County, and from the late Pleistocene Vero locality, Indian River County. Researchers using the UF/FGS database should be aware that when the catalogue data for the FGS collection was first transferred from the original file cards to a computerized database in the late 1980s, relatively little effort was made to correct or improve entries. The nature of specimen was not indicated on many of the cards, locality information was sometimes vague, and many employed taxonomic names that are no longer in use. While some corrections have subsequently been made to this database, limitations of time and resources have prevented an exhaustive clean-up. Also, when Sellards left Florida for Texas in the 1920s, he transferred some, but not all, of the holotypes in the FGS collection that he had named to the USNM collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
United States Geological Survey
Water Management Districts of Florida
For information about the Florida Geological Survey:
Dr. Jon Arthur
Florida Geological Survey
903 West Tennessee Street
Tallahassee, FL 32304-7000
Phone: (850) 488-4191 Fax: (850) 488-8086
Acknowledging or Crediting the Florida Geological Survey As Creative Entity or Information Source
The Florida Geological Survey is providing many of its publications (State documents) for the purpose of digitization and Internet distribution. If you cite or use portions of these electronic documents, which the Florida Geological Survey (an office of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) is making available to the public with the kind assistance of the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center, we ask that you acknowledge or credit the Florida Geological Survey as the information source:
i.e. “Courtesy of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Geological Survey”
Further, since Florida Geological Survey publications were developed using public funds, no proprietary rights may be attached to FGS publications wholly or in part, nor may FGS publications be sold to the U.S. Government or the Florida State Government as part of any procurement of products or services. Our publications are disseminated to citizens “as is" for general public information purposes; many of them reflect the state of knowledge at the time of their publication and they may or may not have been updated by more recent publications. Our electronic documents should not be altered or manipulated (largely or in part) and then republished or reposted on websites for commercial resale.
FGS Publications Committee