GoKawiilThe “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible May 15, 2026
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))))
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