These days the Houston Museum of Natural Science is a quiet place. The field trippers are all at home, the teachers, too. The grand hall has an eerie stillness. Luke Jerram’s Moon hangs lonely in the Glassell Hall. The paleo lab is closed. The pendulum is still swinging, by the way, but no one is […]
The exhibition halls are quiet. The parking garage is empty. Our butterflies continue to flutter around the Cockrell Butterfly Center. A few scattered staff members tend to our wildlife collection, our dinosaurs, and all of those precious gems and minerals. You could say the museum is resting while the rest of the world fights this […]
Chances are if you have found yourself outside after dark in the past few weeks you have encountered a handful of June bugs on the ground. If you have children, they are no doubt collecting them for some sort of strange insect rodeo. The good news is that they are harmless, that is unless they […]
When the Houston Museum of Natural Science closed for business on March 16 as the city of Houston buckled down to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 patients, the museum’s educational department swung into action. HMNS Videographer John Danielson along with VP of Education Nicole Temple, Director of Curriculum and Content Kat Havens, Assistant Director of […]
Everything seems to happen on the nines here at HMNS. The Houston Scientific Society was founded in 1909. Our exhibits moved to the zoo at Hermann Park in 1929, becoming the Houston Museum of Natural History. In 1959 we snagged the land where we are sitting now and we became the Houston Museum of Natural […]
HMNS Sugar Land turns ten this year! An anniversary grants the opportunity to gaze into past in hopes of seeing significance in plans for the future. In 2009 the time came for the Houston Museum of Natural Science to come to the suburbs, with the Sugar Land satellite location opening its doors inside a former […]
Between the years 1989 and 2009 the Houston Museum of Natural Science greatly expanded its footprint across the Houston-area, furthering its mission beyond its Hermann Park location in very ambitious ways. The museum’s scope was changing ahead of a new century, because it had too. Just as Houston was evolving, so was the HMNS family, […]
The city of Houston had already firmly grasped its place in history as “Space City” by the time Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969. The Houston Astros played inside the Astrodome, Judge Roy Hofheinz’s man-made UFO just south of the Texas Medical Center. Sweaty kids acted out otherworldly adventures in plastic […]
This week we hung out with the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s vice president of astronomy Dr. Carolyn Sumners and talked about the Foucalt Pendulum here at the museum. The occasion? January 8 is Earth’s Rotation Day, one of those wild not-a-real-holiday holidays that we only celebrate on the internet. VISITING THE STARS: Learn more […]
Tucked away inside the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s extensive off-site archives, among taxidermy and specimens galore from over a century of collecting, stands a piece of Houston television history on three rickety wheels. It was in 1971 that the team at KPRC-TV donated one of its studio cameras to HMNS. For years it stood […]
