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 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 […]
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 […]
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 article is the second in a weekly […]
Women in procession, with offerings to a deceased person. From our Hall of Ancient Egypt. 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 […]
One of the most common questions we’ve received here at HMNS is how we know how old our artifacts and fossils are. There are a number of different ways to go about aging an object. Relative dating techniques can provide a general age range, which can be to within decades or sometimes within […]
Everyone knows about the bow and arrow, the sling shot, and the spear, but most people have never heard of an atl atl. For thousands of years, going all the way back to the Pleistocene, this was our ancestors’ weapon of choice when hunting large game. So let’s see how easy these things are […]
Photo courtesy of wikipedea When you think of a camel, you probably imagine it standing in the middle of a North African or Asian desert. Nowadays camels live in the arid climates of the Middle East and Central Asia, but that wasn’t always the case. Let’s not forget that the closest relatives of Old […]
