Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

File:People of Oklahoma.jpg

People of Oklahoma exhibit.

The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum located on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. The museum was founded in 1899 by an act of the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature, and opened its doors on its current location in 1999. The museum contains approximately "7 million objects and specimens in 12 collections." It has almost 50,000 sq ft (4,600 m²) of exhibit space, with five galleries and exhibits that provide an in-depth tour of Oklahoma’s natural history. It is "one of the world's largest university-based natural history museums."

Before its 1999 relocation and expansion, the original museum chartered by the Legislature in 1899 had been known in much smaller quarters on campus as the Stovall Museum of Science & History, named for J. Willis Stovall, a paleontologist and faculty professor who assembled much of the original collection.

Native American languages

The Annual Oklahoma Native American Language Fair is held at the museum every April. In 2013, the fair set a new record for attendance, with 921 Native American language students representing 46 different languages. Over 72 languages are held in the museum archives.

Notable specimens

• The world's largest Apatosaurus skeleton.
• The Cooper Skull, a bison skull, found in 1994, is "the oldest painted object in North America."
• A Titanoceratops skeleton with a very large skull 3.1 meters high, the largest skull of any known land vertebrate. The skull was excavated in 1941, but was not removed from its rock matrix until 1995. It was originally labelled as a Pentaceratops.
• A number of Mississippian culture stone effigy pipes and other artifacts from the Craig Mound at the Spiro Site.

Gallery

• DunkleosteusSannoble.JPG

  Dunkleosteus

• PentaceratopsSamnoble.JPG

  Titanoceratops

• Gomphotherium.JPG

  Gomphotherium

• Crystal boatstone.jpg

  Crystal boatstone atlatl weight, a Pre-Columbian artifact