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 diversity of material on display has a qualitative impact, which gave me the feeling of walking through a cabinet of curiosities the size of a basketball court. I think it’s the most impressive temporary exhibit I’ve ever seen, and by far my favorite.

Here’s another thing I’d never seen in person: a cast skull of a hammerhead shark. Just incredible. As the artist and author Ricardo Delgado, creator of the Age of Reptiles comics, often says, “Nature is the best creature designer.”

The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit is the brainchild of Rob Gaston, shown here with some bespectacled doofus for scale. Rob and the crew at Gaston Design do great work — I’ve got a couple of their casts right here in my home office as I type. Because I got to go behind the scenes while they were setting up, I got to say hi to Rob and congratulate him on such a fantastic exhibit. If you’re within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, between now and late August, go see it. It’s included with the extremely reasonable museum admission (max $12 for non-senior adults, even less expensive for everyone else), and hey, you get to see the whole rest of the museum, too. See the museum website for details.

Parting shot: some utter genius in the museum gift shop got into the spirit of things by putting a Triceratops mask on this stuffed polar bear. I love this unreasonably and it’s only because of carry-on luggage limitations that I didn’t bring it home with me. Maybe you will succeed where I fell short.

I’ll have more to say about my trip in another post (Sauroposeidon!), so here I’ll just say a quick thanks to the museum director, Dr. Janet Braun, for the kind invitation to come speak; to Assistant Director Laura Moon and all the staff for making my visit successful and enjoyable; and to vert paleo curator Dr. Jacqueline Lungmus and the VP staff and volunteers for letting me come play in their sandbox. It was a heck of a trip, and you’ll be able to read more about it real soon.

References

• Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
• Tanaka, Tomonori; Chiba, Kentaro; Ikeda, Tadahiro; Ryan, Michael J. 2024. A new neoceratopsian (Ornithischia, Ceratopsia) from the Lower Cretaceous Ohyamashimo Formation (Albian), southwestern Japan. Papers in Palaeontology, 10 (5).

doi:10.59350/c3sc0-xkm48