Texas Memorial Museum

Texas Memorial Museum (Austin, TX)

This small museum on the campus of the University of Texas, built in the 1930s, is now exclusively a natural history museum, featuring displays on evolution, Texas wildlife, and vertebrate paleontology.

The basement houses the Shoal Creek plesiosaur, the Onion Creek mosasaur, several dinosaur skeletal fragments, and various Paleozoic and Cenozoic animals (including the giant "armadillo," glyptodont, below). Majestically soaring over the main hall is the Texas pterosaur, quetzalcoatlus northropi (above).


Outside, you will find a small building housing a section of the Glen Rose dinosaur trackway, and a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a smilodon (sabre-toothed cat).

Nearby are the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the Lyndon Johnson Library and Museum, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, and the Capitol Visitors Center.