The Biodiversity Collections represent large and diverse groups of organisms, including plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects, and a variety of other invertebrates. One focus of the collections is Texas, but research by UT students and faculty over the decades has assembled important material from throughout the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
A recent and significant addition is the Genetic Resources Collection, which houses samples and extracted DNA from specimens in the collections. This resource is crucial to expanding research that merges molecular biology with discovery the natural world.
The collections have a long history with the University of Texas, most having been established in the 1930s. Once part of a research and collections unit within the Texas Memorial Museum, they now exist as part of the Department of Integrative Biology and play a central role in the department's new Biodiversity Center.
With over 1,000,000 specimens, the Plant Resource Center is the largest herbarium in the southwestern United States and ranks fifth among U.S. university herbaria and twelfth across the nation. About a quarter of its specimens are from Texas and our collection has the largest holdings of Texas plants in the world. Nearly one half of the specimens at TEX-LL are from Latin America, with an especially strong representation of Mexico and northern Central America. Presently the number of vascular plant collections inserted in the herbarium is growing at an approximate rate of 16,400 specimens per year.