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VIRTUAL TOUR | Take a sneak peek inside the NEW Witte Museum

The New Witte Museum brings museum visitors into a world of new experiences that draw on the culture of Texas for inspiration.

In the words of fictional entrepreneur John Hammond, “Welcome… to Jurassic Park.”

Wait… No…

Welcome to the NEW Witte Museum.

It’s a project that has been more than 10 years in the making but it is finally here. The new Wittie museum opened its doors Saturday morning.

“This beautiful Susan Naylor Center has been in the works, a concept, for about a decade now,” said Witte Director of Communications Katye Brought. “And we are finally opening up to the public. Everyone’s going to get to walk through and experience the new Witte.”

The New Witte Museum brings museum visitors into a world of new experiences that draw on the culture of Texas for inspiration.

“What I wanted to do for the Witte Museum, since we are very much a regional Texas museum, we tell a story of San Antonio and the surrounding areas and beyond,” Dr. Thomas Adams said, Witte’s curator of paleontology and geology. “We wanted to do that here.”

Dr. Adams said we know these dinosaurs were in San Antonio not because we find their fossils here but because we find their footprints here. Footprints that have been found in the area have been cast and are on display in the new Witte.

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You can also see the buffalo and wildlife that many think of when visiting the Witte but bigger and better. When you walk into the McLean Family Texas Wild Gallery you are sitting under the Big Texas Sky that changes from dusk to dawn.

“I’d say what makes the McLean Family Texas Wild Gallery unique is the immersiveness,” Witte's Curator of Texas Wild Helen Holdsworth said. “Having that experience of being able to see a large landscape is unique.”

The new Witte galleries have labs that help visitors to experience history with as many senses possible. There is an area where you can study cave art simply by making your own helping children understand how the people of the Pecos lived thousands of years ago.

“I think one of the great elements about the new Witte is that each of the galleries has an immersive lab or labs attached to it,” Brought said. “You can have a digital fossil dig. You can actually dig for a Dromaeosaurus.”

Brought said the Witte Museum will help all who visit ‘to discover where nature, science and culture meet here in Texas.’

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