The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is a natural history

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

 museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

 in Norman, Oklahoma

Norman, Oklahoma

Norman is a city in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, United States, and is located south of downtown Oklahoma City. It is part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. As of the 2010 census, Norman was to have 110,925 full-time residents, making it the third-largest city in Oklahoma and the...

, operated by the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

The University of Oklahoma is a coeducational public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two became the state of Oklahoma. the university had 29,931 students enrolled, most located at its...

. It is currently housed in a building on Chautauqua Avenue that opened on May 1, 2000. The museum's exhibits include a Native American gallery and collections of fossils and dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...

 skeletons from Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

 and throughout the world. The museum features seven different galleries as well as the interactive, hands-on Discovery Room. With twelve collection divisions and over 6,000,000 items, Sam Noble is one of the world's largest university-based natural history museums. On October 25, 2006 it was announced that the museum got a one million dollar gift to build an orientation gallery and Paleozoic Hall expected to open in Spring 2009 and May 31, 2008.

Among the museum's notable items are:

• The world's largest Apatosaurus
  Apatosaurus
  Apatosaurus , also known by the popular but scientifically deprecated synonym Brontosaurus, is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived from about 154 to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period . It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of and a...
  
   skeleton.
• The Cooper Skull, a bison skull, found in 1994, which is "the oldest painted object in North America."
• A Pentaceratops
  Pentaceratops
  Pentaceratops is a genus of ceratopsid dinosaur from the late Cretaceous Period of what is now North America. The appearance of Pentaceratops sternbergii in the fossil record marks the end of the Judithian land vertebrate age and the start of the Kirtlandian...
  
   skeleton with a skull 3.1 meters high, the largest known of a land vertebrate. The skull was excavated in 1941, but was not removed from its rock matrix until 1995.
• A number of Mississippian culture
  Mississippian culture
  The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 800 CE to 1500 CE, varying regionally....
  
   stone effigy pipes
  Mississippian stone statuary
  The Mississippian stone statuary are artifacts of polished stone in the shape of human figurines made by members of the Mississippian culture and found in archaeological sites in the American Midwest and Southeast...
  
   and other artifacts from the Craig Mound at the Spiro Site
  Spiro Mounds
  Spiro Mounds is an important pre-Columbian Caddoan Mississippian culture archaeological site located in present-day eastern Oklahoma in the United States. The site is located seven miles north of Spiro, and is the only prehistoric Native American archaeological site in Oklahoma open to the public...
  
  .

External links

• Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum
• Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on TravelOK.com Official travel and tourism website for the State of Oklahoma