The Naranjo Museum of Natural History is a museum located in

Lufkin, Texas Lufkin is the largest city in Angelina County, Texas and the county seat. The city is situated in Deep East Texas and about 60 miles west of the Texas-Louisiana border. Its estimated population is 35,021 as of July 1, 2019. Lufkin was founded ...

Background

The museum was founded by Neal Naranjo, a doctor of

neuropsychology Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology often focus on how injuries or illnesses of t ...

. Naranjo has been a collector of fossils from a young age, and in 2006 he began showing his large collection of fossils to students in the Lufkin area and in 2012 they established a permanent, ten thousand square foot location. The museum, which drew one hundred thousand visitors in its first full year of operation, serves as a permanent location to display his collection, the highlight of which is a

hadrosaur Hadrosaurids (), or duck-billed dinosaurs, are members of the ornithischian family Hadrosauridae. This group is known as the duck-billed dinosaurs for the flat duck-bill appearance of the bones in their snouts. The ornithopod family, which includ ...

. The artifacts range from pre-historic to modern and include five dinosaur eggs thought to be more than sixty million years old as well as a replica T-Rex sourced from the

Hell Creek Formation The Hell Creek Formation is an intensively studied division of mostly Upper Cretaceous and some lower Paleocene rocks in North America, named for exposures studied along Hell Creek, near Jordan, Montana. The formation stretches over portions of ...

that the museum named Bubba Rex. It is the only tyrannosaurus in East Texas.

References

External links

* {{coord, 31.2685, -94.7421, type:landmark_region:US-TX, display=title Tourist attractions in Angelina County, Texas Natural history museums in Texas