The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, a specialized natural history museum, is a collecting museum. Its collection of shells and preserved specimens represents a large fraction of the global biodiversity of mollusks. The Museum houses a collection of worldwide and local mollusks that encompasses about 150,000 lots. The collection is expanding, with a growing focus on mollusks from the coast of southwest Florida, its barrier islands, and the Gulf of Mexico. The increasingly regional nature of the collection has attracted a large number of national and international students and scientists who visit the Museum to examine specimens in their fields of expertise. Records of our holdings are managed through a database management system and searches of the collection may be performed online.
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