The Texas Memorial Museum on the UT campus is a natural history museum with a focus on Texas's geology, paleontology, and wildlife. The building, a WPA-era Art Deco structure from 1939, is worth seeing for its architecture alone: the grand hall and exterior ornamentation are impressively scaled. Inside, the fossil collections are the highlight — Texas's geological history has produced an extraordinary array of dinosaur and Pleistocene megafauna remains.
The Onion Creek mosasaur skeleton, a 35-foot marine reptile that once inhabited the shallow sea that covered Texas 85 million years ago, is the centrepiece of the fossil hall. The museum also holds important collections of Texas minerals, insects, and native wildlife. Admission is free. The museum is slightly hard to find on the UT campus; enter from Trinity Street near the corner with East 24th Street.