Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

The current building is a 198,000-square-foot facility with almost 50,000 square feet (4,600 m2) of public space, with five permanent and two temporary galleries and exhibits that provide an in-depth tour of Oklahoma's natural and cultural history.

Before its 1999 relocation and expansion, the original museum chartered by the Oklahoma legislature in 1899 had occupied much smaller quarters in various buildings on campus.

The attempts were nearly successful in 1920 when university leadership funded an expedition to Alaska for the collection of North American megafauna specimens (grizzly bears, caribou, mountain goats, etc.).

At the time, President Franklin Roosevelt and his Works Progress Administration (WPA) sought to ease mass unemployment during the Great Depression through federal jobs and careers.

Discovering a number of large, unique specimens of dinosaurs and mammals, the museum’s vertebrate fossil collection quickly grew in prominence, while also demanding additional storage space.

These WPA excavations deepened the understanding of Native American pre-contact history in Oklahoma and yielded cultural material that formed the basis of the museum’s early archaeology collection.

In the late 1930s, Stovall was named as the director of this early museum, which was largely scattered among numerous university colleges and departments.

By 1980, the museum collections remained scattered across 10 separate buildings, often substandard for specimen preservation, including a horse stable, a wooden barn, two wooden barracks constructed during World War II, various attics and basements, and an armory for the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) constructed in the 1930s that served as the museum’s main building.

In the early 1990s, a group of concerned citizens in Norman, Oklahoma, began to lobby for a new museum facility to better care for the state’s collection of natural and cultural artifacts.

Stretching back into the prehistory of Oklahoma, the Siegfried Family Hall of Ancient Life extends from the formation of Planet Earth up to the most recent Ice Age.

From the Ozark highlands, limestone caves, mixed grass prairies, to the Black Mesa, the habitats of Oklahoma all come together in some of the most recent and interactive additions to the Sam Noble Museum.

The nucleus of the collection was made under the Works Projects Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s, led by the museum’s first director, J. Willis Stovall (1891–1953).

Spanning more than 300 million years geologic time, the collection is notably strong in Early Permian tetrapods, Jurassic dinosaurs, Miocene-Pliocene mammals of Oklahoma, as well as vertebrate faunas from the Cretaceous of the Western Interior.

Noteworthy individual fossils or assemblages include diverse and well-represented fauna from Early Permian fissure fills, a collection of baby sauropod bones from the Morrison Formation, large samples of Miocene horse species, a large and diverse collection of Cretaceous microvertebrates (such as mammals and lizards) from the western United States, and some relatively complete or unique specimens of Cretaceous dinosaurs (such as Tenontosaurus and Pentaceratops).

Trilobite collections have grown significantly in recent years with additions from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, the Upper Mississippi Valley, the Great Basin and Wyoming.

The Amoco donation consists of significant holdings of fossils related to oil and gas exploration that were collected by the company prior to its merger with BP.

These specimens include 50,000 overall slabs and plant macrofossils that are categorized as single taxon specimens, or taxa, on slabs, over 50,000 palynological slides and residues, over 18,500 coal ball peels (free and mounted on microscope slides), over 5,000 kg of cut and uncut coal balls, over 8,300 ostracods in micromounts, over 3,000 unprocessed reserves, over 3,400 minerals, rocks and meteorites, including the Keyes Meteorite, and 550 herbarium sheets containing modern plants from which a pollen reference collection has been made.

The collection documents the paleobotany, palynology and micropaleontology of sediments from the Proterozoic to the Pleistocene and represents a significant research source for comparative paleobotanical and/or paleoecological studies and for new, innovative investigations into the world’s geologic past.

The collection’s most notable artifacts include the Cooper Bison Skull, one of the oldest painted objects in North America at roughly 10,000 to 11,000 years old, and the Burnham Bison Skull with associated artifacts, which provide evidence of human presence in North America prior to 11,000 years ago, and pre-dating Clovis culture.

The museum also preserves an extensive number of classical artifacts from the Mediterranean region and important ethnographic arts from East Asia.

Founded in 2002, the Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Museum provides invaluable resources to researchers, educators and students.

In 2011, the mammal collection from the University of Memphis was transferred to the Sam Noble Museum with funding from the National Science Foundation.

The availability of these long-term samples of specimens from statewide sites provides an important opportunity to assess natural variation in fish communities.

The collection currently holds over 55,000 tissue samples representing over 1,300 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, and invertebrates.

There is a strong representation of mammals from Argentina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee; amphibians and reptiles from the United States and the Philippines; birds from the Great Plains; and fish from Puerto Rico.