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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Oftentimes we find ourselves in social situations with people we’ve never met before. You may be in a doctor’s office, a school open house, or even at a social event in our Museum. While mingling with new people the same conversations invariably come up, with the subject matter being almost as predictable as your favorite […]
If you want to be a paleontologist, you’ve got to get your hands dirty… and sometimes wet. Now you can learn just what it takes to get down to the nitty-gritty of separating fossils from soil and get a little messy yourself! Just come to the Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land for […]
The earth is 4.54 billion years old. That’s a big number to wrap your head around. Spending time among very old things helps, but even then it’s easy to forget that not only the fossils themselves are ancient; so is the rock they came out of, the planet circling a sun that has been around […]
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s reading books about the dinosaur “orthodoxy.” According to this traditional view, the dinos died out at the end of the Cretaceous because their beloved swamps dried up and the air became too cool. But the new conditions were perfect for us quick-thinking Mammalia, so we took over, along […]
I love my job. Not everyone can say that. My avocation and vocation are as two eyes with one sight (paraphrasing Robert Frost). Part of that job was taking a group of 15 patrons up to the Museum’s dig site outside Seymour, Texas. There, under the tutelage of Dr. Robert Bakker and David Temple, the group learned […]
