Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
science and nature museum at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma
The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, formerly the Stovall Museum of Science and History and The Museum of the University of Oklahoma, is the officially designated natural history museum for the State of Oklahoma, located on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. The museum was founded in 1899 by an act of the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature. Its current building was completed in 1999 under the leadership of Michael A. Mares, who was director from 1983 to 2003 and from 2008 to 2018. The museum contains more than 10 million objects and specimens in 12 collections. 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. The remainder of the facility is dedicated to housing museum collections, laboratories, libraries, and offices. 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 Oklahoma legislature in 1899 had occupied much smaller quarters in various buildings on campus. It was originally named as the Department of Geology and Natural History, renamed the Museum of the University of Oklahoma in 1943, and in 1953 named the Stovall Museum of Science and History, for J. Willis Stovall, a paleontologist and faculty professor who was director from 1943 to 1953.
History
Nearly 10 years after the founding of the University of Oklahoma in 1890, the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature became interested in establishing a museum at what was then the Territorial University.
The public source identifies “Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History” as science and nature museum at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Noble, Oklahoma and Museum.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3330870. VIAF identifies the subject as 142165126. The Library of Congress control number is no00034583. Authority coordinates are 35.194, -97.449. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1999, 1983 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.