Ernesto Vargas-Perra remembers the moment at age 13 when he realized that he could turn his fascination with fossils into a career by becoming a paleontologist.

Like countless young people before him and since, Vargas-Perra was exploring the world around him through exhibits and programs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the University of Oklahoma’s Norman campus.

With its towering specimens, intricate fossils, and ancient and contemporary objects, the Sam Noble Museum is celebrating a quarter century in its world-class facility, which tells the story of our state, our world and our place within it. Rich and informative permanent galleries throughout the museum’s halls offer details on the land, its people, wildlife and ecosystems. Educational programs for people of all ages and youth-focused day and summer camps inspire understanding of the science that surrounds us.

The museum was officially established by the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature in 1899 and today includes more than 10 million specimens and objects from life, earth and social sciences. The impact of this internationally recognized institution on the communities it serves has been immense, says Director Janet Braun.

“Just since 2000, half a million school-age children have visited the museum on school field trips and participated in nearly 5,000 educational programs,” she says. “By spring, more than 3 million visitors will have been through our doors.”

Braun has been part of the museum’s evolution since 1984 and held various administrative and curatorial positions before becoming director in 2023.

She clearly recalls a time before the then-Stovall Museum of Natural History relocated from its small, aged facility on Asp Avenue and was renamed—as well as the solace staff experienced when museum collections were finally contained under one protective roof.

“Seeing the building open in 2000 brought a great sense of relief,” she says. “Collections had been stored across campus in World War I ROTC buildings, barns and stables. This was not the way our people’s heritage should be preserved. With the new building complete, we could focus on telling Oklahoma’s stories through our exhibitions and programs, and our faculty curators could continue doing world-class research.”

Research is a vital aspect of the museum’s dual mission of outreach and teaching.

“As an organization within OU, we have an academic mission to serve students through our faculty curators, who teach, conduct research and mentor undergraduate and graduate students,” Braun adds.

Among the museum’s most important public missions involves its Native American Languages collection, founded in 2002 and designed to preserve linguistic resources while supporting tribal language retention and revitalization.

Each year, the museum’s Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair draws up to 1,000 student participants from pre-K through 12th grade and more than 3,500 visitors. The museum also is collaborating with tribal nations to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. By law, NAGPRA requires agencies and institutions receiving federal funds to repatriate ancestors and certain cultural items to the appropriate parties by January 2029.

“This work has entailed removing from exhibition objects that are interpreted as funerary or considered sacred and part of tribal rituals in consultation with tribal guidance,” Braun says. “We are working very closely with Native nations in Oklahoma and throughout the United States to meet that deadline.”

Claire Nicholas, the museum’s assistant curator of ethnology and an OU assistant professor of anthropology, joined the museum in 2021 as it was recovering from the challenges of the COVID pandemic. Building on historically strong relationships with Oklahoma communities and tribal nations, she and her colleagues are working to foster outreach and renewed connections.

“We try to model both curiosity and respect for the communities whose material culture we care for, and we always look for ways to convey that culture is not static,” she says. “It’s a living thing that reflects our histories, our present and our visions for the future.”

Nicholas has joined the museum team’s efforts to design collaborative exhibits and programming, such as the 2021 exhibit, Guatemalan Textiles: Heart of the Maya World, produced in partnership with the Guatemalan Consulate in Oklahoma City and members of Oklahoma's Guatemalan community.

More widely, traveling exhibits and discovery kits allow the museum to expand to the four corners of Oklahoma, Braun says. Such outreach is vital due to the state’s geographic size and a lack of resources that make visiting the museum difficult for many schools.

The Sam Noble museum’s digital and physical Discovery Kits help fill that gap and have been checked out more than 800 times since 2016, with more than 34,500 students and teachers using them, Braun says.

Back in Norman, many of the museum’s public programs introduce students to science by taking them outdoors. Some 10,000 children have participated in camps like Summer Explorers. Hands-on programs under the museum’s ExplorOlogy umbrella—PaleoExpedition, Oklahoma Science Adventure, ScienceEscape, Science Institute and ExplorOlogy in Motion—reached more than 50,000 schoolchildren within their first five years.

Among those schoolchildren was Ernesto Vargas-Parra, currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. In 2008, he was that seventh grader in Oklahoma City who had a fascination with fossils. A promotional flyer for ExplorOlogy changed his educational trajectory.

“At this point I don’t think I had ever seen a fossil in person or gone to a museum, but I spent a lot of time looking at them on computers at my local public library,” Vargas-Parra says. “When my geography teacher said Sam Noble’s summer programs were perfect for me, I joined Oklahoma Science Adventure and ExplorOlogy, taking science field trips across the state.

“The first summer, I realized it’s possible to make a career out of paleontology by asking deep-time, evolutionary questions combining observations from both biology and geology,” Vargas-Parra says, adding that his current research interest is in trilobites, an ancient, crawly marine organism.

Vargas-Parra later became a museum peer mentor through Paleo Expedition and says that his museum experiences inspired him to pursue a college education. He received a Gates Millennium Scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Geophysical Sciences. He also obtained a master's degree in Geological Sciences and a Ph.D. in Comparative Biology. Vargas-Parra hopes to eventually become a college professor, continuing to study and share his love of fossils with others.

“I owe so much to the members of the Sam Noble Museum education department, whose staff basically watched me grow up through the museum’s summer programs,” he says.

Braun says Vargas-Parra’s story is a perfect example of how the Sam Noble Museum’s programs and collections bring the past and future together for Oklahomans. She looks forward with excitement to the next decade, which is full of potential for developing programs and research that will reach new generations.

“We appreciate where we’ve been, where we are now and where we are going,” Braun says. “We are here to tell the history of Oklahoma and its people and hope to continue our mission for at least another century.” 

Susan Grossman is Senior Program Officer for the Kirkpatrick Foundation in Oklahoma City and a freelance writer who lives in Norman, Okla. 

To comment on this story, click here.