The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum in Norman, Oklahoma, operated by the University of Oklahoma. 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 skeletons from Oklahoma 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 skeleton.
* The Cooper Skull, a bison skull, found in 1994, which is "the oldest painted object in North America."
* A Pentaceratops 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 stone effigy pipes and other artifacts from the Craig Mound at the Spiro Site.
Museums - Science, Buildings - Museums
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By: kjfitz
