Texas Science and Natural History Museum
Science and natural history museum in Austin, Texas
Texas Science & Natural History Museum is located on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, U.S. It opened as Texas Memorial Museum during preparations for the Texas Centennial Exposition held in 1936. The museum's focus is on natural history, including paleontology, geology, biology, herpetology, ichthyology and entomology. Texas Memorial Museum building was designed in the Art Deco style by John F. Staub, with Paul Cret as supervising architect. Ground was broken for the building by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1936. The museum was opened on January 15, 1939.
The museum won "Best of Austin" awards from the Austin Chronicle in 2002, 2005, and 2012.
The museum had exhibits on Texas history, anthropology, geography, and ethnography, but these were relocated to other museums (including the Bullock Texas State History Museum) in 2001. In October 2013, Linda Hicke, the dean of Austin's College of Natural Sciences, cut the museum's funding by $400,000.
The museum closed in 2022 for extensive renovations. It underwent a re-branding and became Texas Science & Natural History Museum.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Texas Science and Natural History Museum” as science and natural history museum in Austin, Texas. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as science and natural history museum in Austin, Texas. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128693643. Authority coordinates are 30.287, -97.732. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1939, 2002 and 2005.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
- Historic place names
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- Routes into maps and plans
Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Texas Science and Natural History Museum”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Texas Science and Natural History Museum primary sources, Texas Science and Natural History Museum archive and Texas research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- What physical evidence or contemporary plan supports the description?
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This entry incorporates text from “Texas Science and Natural History Museum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.