jaw-dropping jaws

Gigantic 50-foot shark dives into Houston museum for jaw-dropping new showcase of Earth's greatest predator

By the numbers, the great white shark is one of the most fearsome predators to ever exist on planet Earth. Consider:

Sharks! The Meg, The Monsters & The Myths HMNS

Photo courtesy of Houston Museum of Natural Science

The largest great white ever recorded spanned 20 feet – half the size of a school bus — and weighed at least 5,000 pounds.
At any given moment, great whites possess 300 teeth — measuring up to 6.6 inches — and can regenerate and replace up to 20,000 in a lifetime.
Swimming up to 35 miles per hour, a great white can launch itself out of the water like a missile.

But those stats are child's play to the great white's prehistoric predecessor, the megalodon (which literally means "big tooth"), which grew to 65 feet long. Known by scientists and fans as the "Meg," the massive monster will star in Houston Museum of Natural Science's new exhibit Sharks! The Meg, The Monsters & The Myths.

The immersive shark fest opens Friday, May 26 to members and Saturday, May 27 to the general public. Tickets are available online.

Dive into the shark tank

Meant to educate and inspire awe and curiosity rather than hysteria, the new exhibition features six galleries that include live shark tank, 14 life-sized models, interactive and touchable items, dazzling digital displays, fun photo ops, and meg-sized chunks of information about the ocean's apex predators.

Visitors can meet these fin-tastic friends via a 360-square-foot virtual “shark tank,” where sharks of all shapes and sizes (there are eight different orders and more than 500 species) swim by, showing off their sleek shapes, bioluminescence, and grace.

Meet the monster Meg

A giant, life-sized, 50-foot model of a female megalodon — in full swim pose and jaws that easily down an entire refrigerator or a few humans — wide open in a toothy grin. The megalodon's sheer mass compared to humans, its color (gray to reflect the sea wall with a "great white" belly) will be on display for photos and wow moments.

Another gallery takes viewers back more than 400 million years to the earliest sharks and fossilized shark teeth. Each visitor can select a fossilized tooth dating back to the Miocene era to keep as part of the journey.

Some gentle bamboo and epaulette sharks will join stingrays (cousins of sharks), sea urchins, and a host of other sea dwellers in an easily viewable tank, which will offer an up-close-and-personal perspective as to why these creatures are so essential to the ecosystem.

No excursion would be complete without swag, and this one offers up toys, puzzles, t-shirts, magnets, and more at the Island Store, which also houses megalodon teeth, fossilized coral, and a 100,000-year-old giant fossil clamshell.

Fans of these finned friends

While they have survived every mass extinction event in the past 450 million years and have ruled their water kingdom for some 300,000 years, sharks are now in peril by the worst predator of all: humans. Spurred by bloodlust after the release of the 1975 epic film and novel Jaws and other sensational pop culture vehicles, an average of 100 million sharks are killed by humans each year.

Whether for sport, shark fin soup (where fins are cut off while the shark is cast back still alive and left to drown), scientists worry that this decimation could mean the end for many of these astounding creatures. '

“Sharks are remarkably diverse and efficient predators but are more threatened than threatening. In fact, over one-third of shark species are now facing the threat of extinction,” said Nicole Temple, the exhibit curator. “With this exhibition, we hope that our guests are able to explore the misconceptions, mysteries, and mystique of sharks to help pave the way for conservation efforts, as well as explore their unique adaptations and behaviors that continue to inspire scientific innovation around the world.”

“Sharks are critical to maintaining the health of our oceans, which are a huge carbon sink for the planet,” Temple adds. “Really, sharks help keep us alive.”

Consider this a chance to visit to a monstrous meg, snap a selfie, and say thanks.

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Sharks! The Meg, The Monsters & The Myths opens Friday, May 26 (members) and Saturday, May 27 (general public) at Houston Museum of Natural Science, 5555 Hermann Park Dr. For tickets and more information, visit HMNS online.

hoop it up

Houston festival hosts dramatic reading of basketball-inspired TV show

Photo by Trent Wittenbach

Hoopzdreams tells the story of a gifted, multiracial athelete.

This year’s Houston Cinema Arts Festival (HCAF), which starts this Thursday, November 6, offers plenty of film screenings – both feature-length films and shorts – as well as panel discussions, Q&As, workshops, etc. But the fest will also have a staged reading of the TV pilot Hoopztown, this Saturday at 2 pm at Six Foot Studios.

Hoopztown centers around Maya Hernandez, a gifted, multiracial athlete on track to be considered for the inaugural WNBA in 1996. She moves back to her hometown of Houston, where it’s revealed that her mother, a janitor at Houston Medical Center, is diagnosed with cancer.

The project is created and written by Fleurette S. Fernando, an educator, director, choreographer, arts administrator, and founding director of the M.A. in Arts Leadership Program at University of Houston, where she serves as an associate professor. “I wrote this story for the women in my life; my mother, my sisters, my teachers, my colleagues, my girlfriends, my students and particularly for my daughter,” says Fernando. “Her journey as a student athlete and the relationships she built with the girls on her various teams through the turbulent and magical years of her youth was an inspiration.”

hoopztown Fleurette S. Fernando Elizabeth Sosa Bailey Collaborators Elizabeth Sosa Bailey and Fleurette S. Fernando.Courtesy of Elizabeth Sosa Bailey

Hoopztown has gone through multiple iterations. During the 2015 ATX TV Festival Pitch Competition, Fernando was a finalist for her concept of the project. From there, the pilot (originally titled Hoopz) and loglines for a 10-episode run were put into motion. That first episode, titled “Rebound,” focuses on Maya’s first day at her new job, coaching a girls’ basketball team at a racially and socioeconomically diverse high school.

“Hoopztown is an ode to a woman’s journey through the lens of many races, ages and circumstances,” she says. “It’s a tribute to the underdog and a homage to a woman’s perilous path through a man’s world. Nowhere is this struggle more acutely demonstrated, mentally, emotionally, physically and economically, than in the arena of competitive sports in America.”

Since Fernando and her creative partner, Elizabeth Sosa Bailey, are both active members of

the Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) board, they knew they had to do a reading during this year’s fest.

“There is so much of myself that I see in this story, as someone who left a career to return home when my father was diagnosed with cancer and as a mixed race Latina understanding the duality of identity,” says Sosa Bailey. “Even the high school that Hoopztown is set in is much like my own. I attended Lamar High School, making me about a decade younger than the characters in the story. There are all of these wonderful little coincidences in Hoopztown.”

The project is a beneficiary of its second Houston Arts Alliance grant made possible through the

City of Houston Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs (MOCA). The reading cast includes over 20 actors, with Eva Marie Thomas playing the main role. Open to the public with a Pay What You Can ticket structure, the event invites the audience to experience the first run-through of what is slated to be the first episode, filmed in Houston using local cast and crew. The audience can also provide feedback and contribute to the project’s fundraising initiative to get to the next stage of filming.

For tickets, go to the Houston Cinema Arts Festival website.

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