Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons With Valentine’s day fast approaching, stores are filled to the brim with extra flowers, candies of all sorts, and bizarre varieties of stuffed animals to proclaim one’s undying love to significant others. Every year at this time, as I look down entire rows of stores covered […]
Want to show your Valentine that your love will last forever? Say it with a cockroach. Before you go all “Eeuuuwwww,”… think about it. These tough little beasts have been living, loving and roaming the earth for 350 million years. It’s even been said they’d survive a nuclear blast. Who knows? They might even outlive […]
The Moon This Month 1st Quarter: February 2, 10:19am Full: February 10, 6:33pm 3rd Quarter: February 18, 1:35am New: February 26, 9:00am The Full Moon of February 10 almost enters the Earth’s shadow. Rather, it enters the penumbra, a region of space where the Earth only partially […]
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia A lot of people tend to think that important business people are boring and dispassionate. But it can’t be denied that success in business requires imagination and a little bit of audacity too. This was especially true in the early days of Houston’s oil boom. During […]
The Houston Museum of Natural Science’s ticketing software has records going back to July 31, 2007. My family’s first recorded transaction in this system was in August 2007. Needless to say, we love the museum. My younger brother and I at the Members’ Preview for the brand new Morian Hall of Paleontology […]
The image above is the so-called “Waldseemuller Map“, one of the oldest maps on display in our new special exhibit: Mapping Texas: From Frontier to Lone Star State. Titled Tabula Terre Nove, the map was produced in 1513 to be included in a new edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographic , a book that was originally written […]
Horseshoe crab death track. Mesolimulus walchi. Solnhofen, Germany. When people walk through our permanent exhibit halls, sometimes they come upon an object that makes them think “what in the world are they doing?“. It can be two fossilized skeletons posed in an unusual arrangement, or an artifact with a strange ritual depicted on it. This […]
Now in its fifty-second year, Wildlife Photographer of the Year is the international leader of innovative visual representation in the natural world. This prestigious competition and resulting exhibition, opening at the Houston Museum of Natural Science Jan. 27, stimulates engagement with the diversity and beauty of the natural world. On loan from the Natural History Museum […]
Archaeologist have identified “transgender” coffins. In eras of economic hardship, coffins would be reused by basically taking the original mummy out, laying it aside, and putting someone else in. If the new occupant was a different sex from the original, artists would alter the coffin, taking off beards and adding or subtracting breasts so […]
Lecture – Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals by Donald Prothero Complete with full-color reconstructions of the beasts–many never before depicted–along with photographs of amazing fossils from around the world, Dr. Donald Prothero will take us on a journey to the Paleocene, 65 million years ago after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Here […]
