Beyond Bones

Imagine you’re on Tinder, maybe wasting time or maybe looking for love, when the plague doctor pops up on your feed! You’d probably be tempted to swipe left as quickly as possible. Well hang on there…not so fast! Even though he looks like the stuff of nightmares, he’s really quite amazing. He may be complicated, […]

  Every year on Valentine’s Day, we in the Cockrell Butterfly Center like to think about all our favorite insects and the methods they use to find mates. From special pheromones to elaborate mating rituals, every insect has a way to find a mate (or more often, multiple mates)!   It’s the smell that counts […]

Was it inevitable that mammals would rule the world after the dinosaurs went extinct? The rise of mammals is often depicted as a pretty smooth transition, but in reality things were a little more complicated. In the wake of the end Cretaceous extinction birds, reptiles and mammals all began to split and diversify to exploit ecological […]

    A trilobite changed my life. I know what you’re thinking, “Say what? That’s just crazy!”  No, it’s true. Please let me explain. I’ve worked at the Houston Museum of Natural Science for close to half my life. Truth be told, the Museum has been a part of my life even longer than that, […]