by Gail Peterkin, HMNS Volunteer “Donate your body to science — volunteer at the Houston Museum of Natural Science!” Or so the tagline goes. Apparently, some volunteers have interpreted the phrase quite literally, and a number of volunteers have spent many years, if not decades, as HMNS volunteers. HMNS currently has 610 active volunteers at […]
If you want to be a paleontologist, you’ve got to get your hands dirty… and sometimes wet. Now you can learn just what it takes to get down to the nitty-gritty of separating fossils from soil and get a little messy yourself! Just come to the Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land for […]
The visit to our active digs at the Craddock Ranch red beds exhausted Kelly and I, but it was fascinating to learn how the Houston Museum of Natural Science discovers, jackets and moves its Permian fossils to our lab. The second day, we lent a hand at the Whiteside Museum of Natural History in Seymour […]
Far up in north Texas, past Ft. Worth and Wichita Falls, past the point where the flora turns from trees to shrubs, past a town with a funny name, Megargel, pop. 203, past a massive wind farm with tall white blades lording over thousands of acres of land, and then another, and another, lies the […]
I love my job. Not everyone can say that. My avocation and vocation are as two eyes with one sight (paraphrasing Robert Frost). Part of that job was taking a group of 15 patrons up to the Museum’s dig site outside Seymour, Texas. There, under the tutelage of Dr. Robert Bakker and David Temple, the group learned […]
We’ve been pondering the problem of Dimetrodon-on-Dimetrodon violence. It’s a Red Beds tragedy; fin-back reptiles were nibbling each other’s brain bones and gouging each others’ cheeks. But now, maybe, we have some evidence for the softer side of fin-backs: hickeys and love-bites. Here’s a scientifically precise reconstruction of one fin-back smooching another on the back […]
Editor’s note: Today’s blog comes to us from paleontologist and field volunteer Neal Immega. You all know by now that the museum has a dig in Seymour where we are finding fabulous Permian fossils, including the toothy Dimetrodon and the weird boomerang-headed salamander Diplocaulus. We don’t dig in just one place; lots of people go […]
Editor’s note: Museum volunteer and Ecoteen Myria Perez was recognized by Mayor Annise Parker on Friday after earning the Girl Scouts’ highest honor for her work with HMNS. Perez collaborated with the HMNS paleontology department to construct a Permian-period touch cart using specimens that she helped uncover at our dig site in Seymour, Texas. We […]
