The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

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The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible

May 15, 2026

An imposing view of a juvenile Utahceratops.

As threatened, I was in Oklahoma at the tail end of last week and over the weekend, mostly to give talks. My Friday evening public lecture was on horned dinosaurs, and it was tied in with the launch of a temporary exhibit called "Bizarre Headgear: Ceratopsians and the Evolution of Extraordinary Skulls". I’ll cover the talks in another post; this one is about that exhibit.

From the museum’s central atrium, there are a couple of passages into the special exhibition gallery that houses "Bizarre Headgear". My preferred way in is the second doorway, farther from the front of the museum, which puts you face-to-face with pterosaurs and hell pigs. This sets up the basic division of the room: mostly Mesozoic and mostly dinos to the left, mostly Cenozoic and mostly mammals to the right (with a few exceptions, like the Synthetoceras visible on the back wall).

From there, turn left and you’ll see horned dinosaurs and many other interesting critters. A lot of them.

Turn right and you’ll see a lot more non-dinosaurs, mostly extinct and extant mammals with a smattering of non-mammals.

I was there to yap about horned dinos, and the exhibit does not slack in this department, starting with this charming side-by-side skeletal reconstruction and lift restoration of Psittacosaurus. The sculpture is by Shane Foulkes, and it looks like a real animal.

A highlight of the exhibit for me is this case of early ceratopsians. From right to left (far to near in this photo) are cast skulls of Liaoceratops, Auroraceratops, Archaeoceratops, and Protoceratops. These are little Aquilops-alikes from Asia. Back in 2014, Farke et al. got this topology:

Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Aquilops (Auroraceratops (Archaeoceratops + all more derived ceratopsians))))

and in 2024, Tanaka recovered these relationships for those same taxa (I’m dropping many others here):

Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Archaeoceratops ((Aquilops + Auroraceratops) + (all more derived ceratopsians))))

I’d never seen so many of these adorable little weirdos in one place. Heck, I’d never even seen casts of Liaoceratops and Auroraceratops in person. So it was nice to get acquainted with the aunts and cousins of Aquilops.

The ceratopsian show continues with a pair of Protoceratops skeletons, followed by skulls of Zuniceratops, Diabloceratops, Kosmoceratops, and a cool Utahceratops with some soft tissue reconstructed. There’s also a mounted skeleton of Torosaurus, and the juvenile Utahceratops shown at the top of the post. This diversity of critters from across the ceratopsian tree was clutch when I helped lead a student tour on Monday. And it was nice to see a lot of animals that weren’t described when I was growing up, and that the average museum-goer might be less familiar with — Diabloceratops instead of Centrosaurus or Styracosaurus, Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops in place of Triceratops and Chasmosaurus.

The exhibit has a lot more than just skulls and skeletons. There are loads of sculptures, both life-sized fleshed-out heads and miniatures showing the whole animal, like this Pachyrhinosaurus. And lots of wall art. I believe all of the sculptures are by Shane Foulkes (and apologies if I missed anyone else). Most of the paintings are by Andrey Atuchin, but there is at least one Mark Hallett piece in the exhibit: Synthetoceras being menaced by an amphicyonid ‘bear-dog’.

The mostly-mammals, mostly-extant side of the exhibit is equally impressive. I’m including fewer photos from that side, because this is already a long post, but I counted at least 65 skulls of non-dinosaurs, including 3 proboscideans and 5 cetaceans. Invertebrates even get a look in, with some of the more baroquely-horned beetles. I nipped into the exhibit while it was still being set up to get some photos for my talk, like this awesome array of African bovids. All of these non-ceratopsians are there to put the evolution of bizarre headgear in dinosaurs into context, and to show that dinos were not incomprehensible monsters, but animals whose anatomy and ecology we can understand, or at least make pretty good inferences about. The signage is uniformly excellent — discreet, informative, and attractively laid out, with a consistent arrangement and color palette.

As long as we’re keeping score, I counted 5 mounted dinosaur skeletons, and 16 other dinosaur skulls. This exhibit is stacked. Every single person I talked to about it, including other paleontologists, staff, security guards, and museum visitors, volunteered something along the lines of "Holy cow, that is a lot of amazing stuff." The sheer density and...