In my years as a tour guide here at HMNS I encountered a lot of good questions. Most of the time the simplest questions were the best ones, like “what is a dinosaur?“. It’s a simple question but it has a complicated answer. For most people, the only prerequisite for being a dinosaur is being […]
Pictured above is a Campa Shaman’s hood, the fourth object to be discussed in our 5 Of The Most Magical Objects In Our Collection series ( click HERE to see the other blogs in the series). You may have noticed that the hood has the body parts of a number of birds and small animals sewn […]
It should come to no one as a surprise that ancient Rome didn’t exactly have the best track record where animal rights were concerned. From pitting large beasts against criminals for punishment to the integration of animal slaying in the games, animals in ancient Rome were subjected to cruelty that offends modern-day sentiments. One of the […]
The New Moon of Monday, August 21, 2017, aligns with the Sun and the Earth well enough to cast its shadow onto the Earth. The umbral shadow, where the Moon completely blocks the Sun, passes across the center of the USA, causing a total solar eclipse on a path from central Oregon to Charleston, SC. […]
Film Screening – Penguins 3D with Diane Olsen Join Diane Olsen who cares for the penguins at Moody Gardens for a special evening viewing of “Penguins 3D” in the Wortham Giant Screen Theatre. A tour of “Faces from the Southern Ocean” will follow the film. Tuesday, June 27, 2017 – 6:30 PM Members $12, Tickets […]
The controversy about whether famous dinosaurs had feathers has been raging for a while now. We’ve known that some dinosaurs had feathers ever since Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, but more recent discoveries of the presence of feather-like structures on larger dinosaurs ( like Lane the Triceratops here at HMNS) that are more distantly related to […]
A perfect example of a fascinating object that most visitors to HMNS don’t see, this ceramic figure of Huehueteotl is of Classic Veracruz origin. The Classic Veracruz Culture existed from roughly 100-1000 AD and is largely unknown to the general public because it is overshadowed by contemporaneous cultures like that of Teotihuacan and later the […]
People come from all over the world to see our Morian Hall of Paleontology, but most of them are so excited to see the dinosaurs that they pass right by the fossils at the entrance to the hall. Those amorphous blocks, seemingly insignificant, are our collection of stromatolites. Stromatolites are columnar structures created by […]
Mixers & Elixirs It’s time to mix it up! Mixers and Elixirs is back for the summer with live music, food trucks, cash bars and intelligent nighlife with a twist. Fridays from 7-10 p.m. June23 – Mango Punch July 21 – Electric Circus August 11 – Grupo Kache […]
By Jerry Offner, Associate Curator for Northern Mesoamerica Houston Museum of Natural science The Houston Museum of Natural Science and La Bibliothèque nationale de France have been cooperating in a new and unique scientific endeavor: special imaging of two Aztec Codex documents from before the Spanish conquest. Part one of this article will discuss the imaging […]
