Photo by Jaime Silva (via Flickr)
Pigeons are so ubiquitous, searching our sidewalks and streets for anything edible, perched overhead on powerlines and building ledges, we don’t really give them much thought. In fact, pigeons get a pretty bad rap sometimes, are written off as nothing more than “rats with wings.” However, they are... 
By Dean Hendrickson (Curator, Ichthyology Collection) and Nicole Elmer
Satan eurystomus (Photo: Garold Sneegas)
In our last Halloween posting, the scorpionfly donned orange, black, and yellow. The species in this blog’s focus is pale and pink. This is Satan eurystomus, also known as the Widemouth Blindcat, a cave catfish, known... 
Mexican free-tailed bat (Photo: Tigga Kingston)
It’s October. The weather cools. People plan their Halloween costumes. Images of ghosts, vampires and other monsters start to fill our neighbors’ lawns or grocery store candy isles. Without a doubt, bats will be part of this montage, but do they deserve the association with scar... 
Pencils in hand, erasers in reach, students huddle over cases of butterflies and beetles. The room is quiet, save for the “scratch scratch” of the pencil lead, the occasional rub of an eraser on paper.
This is a scene from “Core II: Drawing,” a class in the First-Year Core Program at the Department of Art and Art History. On September 12t... 
The National Science Foundation recently awarded the Billie L. Turner Plant Resource Center a new grant for approximately $817,000. The grant extends over four years to complete the digitization of more than 500,000 herbarium specimens collected in the states of Texas and Oklahoma and housed in the herbaria, as well as those of 10 partner instituti... 
Bufo valliceps. (Photo: Drew Davis)
While it might be easy to assume we don’t have toads on campus, the Gulf Coast Toad (Bufo valliceps) is one species that does live here. Waller Creek is a one place to see them, in addition to planters where they hide, or on sidewalks at twilight to consume the insects that are att... 
Photo: California Department of Water Resources (Wikimedia commons)
With their ringed tails and black “masks,” raccoons (Procyon lotor) are easy to recognize. These curious and smart mammals are native to North America. Due to their extreme adaptability and opportunistic natures, they are also part of the urban wildlife on the UT ... 
Illustration by Joseph R. Tomelleri
The only member of this minnow genus known from Texas, the Río Grande Chub, Gila pandora (Cope, 1872), lives in about a dozen sites in Río Grande tributaries of New México, and Colorado, and in one highly isolated, one mile-long section of a small stream in the Davis Mountains o... 
Male red-eared slider, posing. (Photo: Nicole Elmer)
They’re out. Stacks of them. Sometimes piled on top of each other like bricks, feet extended, much to the delight of students and visitors to the UT turtle pond. These campus charmers are turtles commonly known as “red-eared sliders,” or Trachemys scripta elegans.
The “red” come... 
Photo: Stanley Trauth 2007 (wikipedia)
A few years ago, I built several ponds near my house at the Double Helix Ranch, hoping that frogs would colonize them and I could enjoy the sound of frog calls outside my window. Several different species have come and bred there including Strecker's Chorus frogs (Pseudacris streckeri), Grey ... 
The Atta roach in a fungus garden. (Photo: Alex Wild)
A moonless springtime night at Brackenridge Field Lab. The sun will rise shortly. The Texas leaf-cutter ants (Atta texana) have started their nuptial flights as the winged virgin females and much smaller males fly about. Some of the queens are not alone in their journeys howeve... 
On May 18th and 19th, the Biodiversity Center hosted the Nature Photograhy Workshop at Stengl Lost Pines Biological Station. The workshop focused on everything from photography basics, to composition, lighting, and processing. About 40 miles outside of Austin, the location of Stengl was an ideal for photographers of nature as the field station comp... 
Virginia Opossum (Photo by Cody Pope)
At night, the UT campus slows but never quite stops. Those out and about in the dark hours might witness some of the nocturnal creatures on campus, one being the only marsupial native to North America: the opossum.
The opossum is of the order Didelphimorphia and is endemic to the Americas, the... 
George Yatskievych, Curator of the Billie L. Turner Plant Resource Center, speaks with a student
Despite the smattering of rain and wind, campus and off-campus organizations partook in the annual Biodiversity Day near Gregory Gym on Wednesday, April 17th. This event was to spread awareness about sustainability, biodiversity, wellness, cli... 
By Adam Cohen, Melissa Casarez and Dean Hendrickson (Ichthyology Collection)
Some of ULM's Texas holdings that are now at UT's Biodiversity Collections. Photo taken at Tulane prior to packing
In spring of 2017, administrators at the University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM, historically NLU – Northeastern Louisiana University) made the dec... 
Photos: Alex Wild
Explore UT is an annual event that encourages students to become excited about higher education and the research opportunities at The University of Texas. And what better way to elicit curiosity than with rows of animal skulls and live snakes, spiders, and cockroaches?
The UT Entomology Colle... 
A young lizard crawls over the eggs of its brethren. (Photo: Yin Qi)
The old riddle “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is not much of a riddle to biologists. The shelled amniote egg, which is familiar to many of us as chicken eggs, evolved about 325 million years ago. The wild ancestors of chickens, in contrast, only appe... 
photo by Jacob McGinnis
Our campus is home to lots of different birds that are impossible to miss: an inky black grackle flying dangerously close overhead, a chubby pigeon picking at a crust of pizza. But with winter upon UT, we also have another visitor: the Cedar Waxwings. These are strikingly beautiful birds that are less obvi... 
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO.
Biodiversity Collections, specifically the Entomology Collection team, are collaborating with researchers from UT's Brackenridge Field Laboratory, University of Georgia, and more to produce a series of SciComm videos that aim to expose people to the decades of research that have gone into what we know abo... 
