Tag Archives: Morian Hall of Paleontology

Family time & me time: Have the best of both at HMNS this holiday season

Published by on in Science
Reply

It’s the holiday season – full of food, festivities and family. Sure, you look forward to this month year-round, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get sick of it. Conversations start to get stale, your mother (or worse – mother-in-law) won’t let you stop stuffing your face, and you begin to worry that none of your pants will fit anymore.

This is enough to make some shout, “Bah humbug!” at every passerby, but it needn’t be so! All you need is some way to divert your family’s attention away from your new piercing, lack of promotion, the boyfriend or girlfriend that they loathe, or whatever childhood embarrassment they still insist on using to regale holiday guests (or worse yet, reenact).

What better way than an outing to the Houston Museum of Natural Science! Not only is this the perfect excuse to get out of the house, but with all of our exhibition halls, there are plenty of places to ditch your family — if only for a short while.

THE MORIAN HALL OF PALEONTOLOGY

The stunning views of fossilized dinosaurs, giant sloths, woolly mammoths and more will buy you just enough time to slip over to the John P. and Katherine McGovern Jurassic Bark Gallery (in a separate room towards the back, on the left). Here you will find sanctuary amongst the remains of a petrified forest – clearly terrified of your family too.

You might also head up to the Morian Overlook. Just as your family’s entering the hall, slip back out, and take the elevator up to the second floor. Be careful they don’t see you, because from here, you can take in the whole hall from above.

THE HALL OF ANCIENT EGYPT

There’s a lot to see in this hall. Rush to the back as you enter while the fam plods along. Here you’ll find the mummies and sarcophagi. And we have great, dim mood lighting – which means you could totally lay out on one of the benches, and people will just think you’re another exhibit! Chill here for a while until your family catches up.

THE COCKRELL BUTTERFLY CENTER

A Rainforest, butterflies, an iguana – let your clan to take it all in while you scope out your next spot.

As you enter the Rain Forest Conservatory, head all the way to the bottom level – into the cave. You can remain unseen from above and chill with all the cool butterflies that are trying to be as exclusive as you.

If you enter the Hall of Entmology from here you’ll be right by the “Land of BEEyond.” Please understand that this area is meant for children, so let them play in peace if they get there first – but after all, you’re a kid at heart, right? Why not chill here? You might even get to meet the queen bee.
THE MINERAL HALL AND SMITH GEM VAULT

This hall is lit perfectly to enhance the natural beauty of the minerals and gems on display — and also perfect lighting for a quick escape from your tribe. Walk briskly, and stick close to the wall on the left. As you round the corner, you’ll come up on the Smith Gem Vault, which, if you’re wearing dark colors, makes you nearly invisible. The only light in this room is focused on the perfectly carved diamonds and other jewels on display. It seriously looks like they’re emitting light themselves.

Hang out here for a while, and if you do it right, you can slip back into the mineral hall as the fam goes in the gem vault. You just bought yourself another 20 minutes of freedom!

Other options for some solace in the Museum:

Wortham Giant Screen Theatre: They won’t be able talk to you in here!
Burke Baker Planetarium: With the added feature of looking up, idle chit-chat is discouraged
The Museum Store: Nothing takes the edge off quite like a bit of retail therapy

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer’s utterly subjective examination

Published by on in Paleontology
Reply

Editor’s Note: This blog comes to us courtesy of longtime volunteer John Moffitt.

I lead tours through the new HMNS Paleo Hall and spend a lot of time in the Paleozoic. Sometimes this ties in with a class on trilobites. During these tours, I answer a lot of questions like, “What is a trilobite, anyway?”

But a favorite question has always been, “What is the best trilobite in the collection?” The question may be worded differently or be slightly more specific, but an array of related questions always comes up:

•    What is the rarest trilobite?
•    What is the most scientifically significant trilobite?
•    What is your favorite trilobite?
•    Which trilobite is the most valuable?

The answers to these and similar questions are often different, and sometimes involve a process of further qualifying the question. To some degree, many of these questions involve personal opinion. For this article, I am going to put the question in terms of my own personal favorite trilobite with no further qualification required. Quite convenient!

I will pretend that I have done something so significant that the museum gives me a one-chance opportunity to walk through the entire trilobite collection, pick one out and take it home to live with me.

Once I’ve selected my favorite, I’ll tell you where to look for my favorite trilobite, a few things about where it was collected, and maybe even a few suggestions on how the museum might improve the overall display.

It will come as no surprise to anybody that knows me that I would select an odontopleurid trilobite, since I often wear one on my hat and my favorite trilobite graphics are nearly always odontopleurids. I am also known to have a special love for Oklahoma Devonian odontopleurids from the Arbuckle Mountains. For this exercise, I will pick an Ordovician odontopleurid, the enrolled Boedaspis ensifer located on your left shortly after entering the Paleozoic part of the museum exhibit.

While Boedaspis ensifer is a very rare Ordovician trilobite, a number of good specimens have been collected over the last 60 years. It wasn’t described until 1960, and even then only from trilobite fragments. Two of the very best complete specimens of Boedaspis ensifer that have ever been collected are in the museum in the current display. Both of these trilobites were donated from the Sam Stubbs collection.

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer's utterly subjective examination

In my opinion, this enrolled specimen of Boedaspis ensifer is the absolute best trilobite in the museum’s collection.
Family: Odontopleuridae BURMEISTER 1843
Genus: Genus Boedaspis WHITTINGTON & BOHLIN 1960
Species: Boedaspis ensifer WHITTINGTON & BOHLIN 1960

My reasons include — but are not limited to — the following:
•    This is a rare trilobite in any condition
•    This is one of the more interesting positions to find an odontopleurid
•    This is one of the best preparations of any trilobite that I’ve ever seen
•    This is one of the most beautiful and spectacular fully prepared trilobites that I’ve ever laid eyes on

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer's utterly subjective examination

This is a map of where most of the museum’s trilobites are displayed:

Using a map of the trilobite section of the hall, you can find my favorite trilobite on Wall C. But you would first need to pass by an outstretched specimen of the exact same species located across the walkway on Wall B, mixed in with some Devonian trilobites. The specimen of Boedaspis ensifer on Wall C was selected mostly because of the position it died and was permanently preserved in, inside mud that finally became rock, and because of the extraordinary preparation used to remove that rock.

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer's utterly subjective examination

Other views of the enrolled specimen Boedaspis ensifer help illustrate why this is — for my money — The Best Trilobite.

A slow turn from the rear position reveals the full richness of this trilobite. The outstretched specimen of that same species is shown here:

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer's utterly subjective examination

Both of these trilobites were collected from the Lower Ordovician Putilovo Quarry and the Kunda Herizont Formation, over 100 kilometers east of St Petersburg, Russia. Notice Putilovo down the M-18 freeway on the right side of this Russian map.

The Best Trilobite: A volunteer's utterly subjective examination

The entire length of this Ordovician shelf is an excellent collecting location for the entire Ordovician geological sequence. The Houston museum collection currently has 20 Ordovician trilobites on display that were collected from this region.

There are a lot of rarer, more important, and more valuable trilobites in the museum’s collection. You have to visit more than once to fully appreciate the many dimensions of this collection of extinct arthropods. Museum members get a free chance to visit the paleo hall as often as they choose, and there is always a FREE afternoon on Thursdays for those who are not museum members. Sam Stubbs has donated many of the trilobite specimens that you will see in this collection, and many of these are the best in the world for that species.

Continue your education at our hands-on Adult Education class this Tuesday, August 6 at 6 p.m. For more information or to reserve tickets online, click here.

Doing better: We heard you out, now we’ll fill you in

Published by on in Behind-the-Scenes
2

Hall_of_Ancient_EgyptRecently, we were featured in a Houston Press article, “10 Things the Houston Museum of Natural Science Could Do Better.” While we welcome both positive and negative feedback from our guests — from pithy tweets to local press — we now realize that we’ve been a bit remiss in filling you in on our master plan. So we thought we’d take this opportunity to share our plans with you. It may help clear up a few concerns and put some happenings here at the Museum into a “big picture” context.

You may have heard of (or visited!) the new Morian Hall of Paleontology. Or perhaps you’ve wandered the cavernous galleries inside our new Hall of Ancient Egypt. You may not realize it, but you’re visiting brand new permanent exhibition halls located in the new Dan L Duncan Family Wing that opened last summer. This expansion more than doubled the size of the Museum’s public exhibition space.

Now that the new wing is open, we are focusing the majority of our energy and resources into completely renovating and upgrading the preexisting, older permanent exhibition halls and displays.

In fact, we’ll be unveiling our newly revamped Welch Chemistry Hall in the fall of 2013. In 2014 and 2015, our Evelyn and Herbert Frensley Hall of African Wildlife and Graham Family Presentation of Ecology and Conservation Biomes and Farish Hall of Texas Wildlife will follow. Our vision is to enlarge, renovate, remodel, and refresh every permanent exhibit hall in the Museum within the next five to seven years.

We hope this explains why some seemingly small changes — while definitely important! — have taken a bit of a backseat to these gigantic renovations. As an institution, we are dedicating investments in time, energy and money to maintaining the Houston Museum of Natural Science as a world class collection of artifacts and exhibitions. Doing so will enrich the lives of our current patrons as well as future generations of nature and science lovers.

Of course, we know you’ve got questions for us. And as your hometown museum, we have answers for you. You’re always invited to send your suggestions, ideas, hopes, and dreams to us. We’re listening. Feel free to send an email to webeditor at hmns dot org if you’ve got something on your mind. We can’t guarantee immediate action on the particular request, but we can guarantee a real, live human being will respond.

Thank you so much for being the most important part of our community. We look forward to being your source for the latest and greatest in the scientific world for years to come!

Cracking the coelacanth code: Living version of HMNS fossil has genome sequenced

Published by on in Paleontology
1

The coelacanth — a “living fossil” believed to have hardly changed over the last 300 million years — has finally had its genome sequenced by European researchers.

courtesy of wiki media
The deep-sea fish was the inspiration for the famous 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon and is well-represented here at HMNS, where we have three examples on display: a Devonian fossil, a Cretaceous specimen and a model like the one sequenced.

Researchers sorted through nearly 3 billion DNA bases to conclude that the coelacanth’s four fleshy fins were likely the early predecessors of limbs.

Although the coealcanth is related to early tetrapods — the first creatures to make the transition from the ocean to land — a comparison of the coelacanth genome with the DNA profiles of lungfish and other modern land-based animals led scientists to conclude that lungfish were the closer relative.

Coelacanths have been notoriously difficult to study, having been assumed extinct until an African fisherman caught the living fossil in 1938. Since then, only a few hundred specimens have been found.

Continue the investigation yourself at our Morian Hall of Paleontology, and see why this mysterious fish has kept researchers rapt for so long.