Texas Memorial Museum

The Texas Memorial Museum, which is located on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, USA, is named in honor of the 1936 Texas Centennial. The museum's focus is on natural history, including paleontology, geology, biology, herpetology, ichthyology and entomology. At one point, the museum also 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. The museum has 75,000 visitors annually.

The 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 and 2005.

In October 2013, it was announced that the museum would be losing $400,000 in funding, ownership would be transferred to the American Legion Texas Branch, and that the staff would be reduced from twelve employees to four: the museum director, a science director, a webmaster, and a private security officer. The museum now is open five days a week and charges admission.

In 1723, the Comanche defeated the Lipan Apache people in a nine-day battle along the Rio del Fierro (Wichita River). The River of Iron may be the location written about by Athanase De Mezieres in 1772, containing "a mass of metal which the Indians say is hard, thick, heavy, and composed of iron", which they "venerate...as an extraordinary manifestation of nature", the Comanche's calling it "Ta-pic-ta-carre [standing rock], Po-i-wisht-carre [standing metal], or Po-a-cat-le-pi-le-carre [medicine rock]", the general area containing a "large number of meteoric masses".

...
Wikipedia