Houston Museum of Natural Science

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a science museum located on the northern border of Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, USA. The museum was established in 1909 by the Houston Museum and Scientific Society, an organization whose goals were to provide a free institution for the people of Houston focusing on education and science. Museum attendance totals over two million visitors each year. The museum complex consists of a central facility with four floors of natural science halls and exhibits, Burke Baker Planetarium, Cockrell Butterfly Center and the Wortham Giant Screen Theatre (formerly known as the Wortham IMAX Theatre). The museum is one of the most popular in the United States and ranks just below New York City's American Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art[citation needed] and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, in most attendance amongst non-Smithsonian museums. Much of the museum's popularity is attributed to its large number of special or guest exhibits.

History
The initial museum organization was called the Houston Museum and Scientific Society, Inc., and was created in 1909. Originally located in the City Auditorium building in downtown, the museum moved to a building within Houston Zoo in 1929. The museum's primary collection was acquired between 1914 and 1930. The museum's now extensive education programs began in 1947, and by its second year, it was hosting 12,000 children a year.

The current facility in Hermann Park was constructed in 1969. In 1988, the Challenger Learning Center was opened in memory of the Space Shuttle Challenger crewmembers that were lost during the shuttle's tenth mission. The Learning Center's aim is to teach visitors about space exploration. The Wortham IMAX Theatre and the offsite George Observatory were opened in 1989. The museum's high attendance allowed HMNS to plan for a large expansion that would more than double its floor space. The planned exhibits would focus on paleontology and astronomy.

Two satellite locations were opened in the 2000s. In March 2007, the museum opened the HMNS Woodlands X-ploration Station, located in the Woodlands Mall. The facility was home to an interactive Dig Pit, where children could excavate a Triceratops, a variety of living exhibits, fossils, and minerals. The Woodlands location closed on September 7, 2009, less than a month before HMNS opened a satellite museum in Sugar Land, Texas.[3]

HMNS celebrated its 100th year in 2009. During that year, the museum offered a multitude of family programs, lectures, free events, and kids' classes as part of the "Fun Hundred" celebration.[4]

On October 3, 2009 HMNS opened its satellite museum in Telfair, Sugar Land.[5] The building and surrounding land that became HMNS at Sugar Land was once part of the Central Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison that had been unoccupied for several decades.

In March 2012 the Wortham IMAX Theatre was converted from 70 mm film to 3D digital and renamed the Wortham Giant Screen Theater.[6]

In June 2012 HMNS opened a new 230,000 square foot wing to house its paleontology hall, more than doubling the size of the original museum. The new Hall of Paleontology contains more than 60 large skeleton mounts, including three Tyrannosaurus rex and three large Quetzalcoatlus.

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