The Texas Museums

Our museum exploration begins in Texas, the second-largest U.S. state, containing a population exceeding 30 million. Four diverse museums are represented: (1) the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, with no human evolution content on display, exemplifying most natural history and science museums in the U.S.; (2) the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which includes human evolution content within its Being Human Hall; (3) the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which presents human evolution at the end of a “safari” through time in the Morian Hall of Paleontology; and (4) Austin’s Texas Memorial Museum, the sole university-located museum surveyed, which formerly displayed the Explore Evolution exhibit funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The chapter ends with a “Side Trip” to San Antonio’s Witte Museum, focusing especially on the difficulty of conceptualizing Deep Time.