Orphaned collections are a growing concern for natural history institutions worldwide.  An endangered or orphaned collection is any considerable body of material, which is or soon may be no longer regarded as of value in its present ownership.  According to the American Association of Museums, every year more institutions, agencies, corporations, and individuals divest themselves of their collections. When this occurs, “orphaned” collections need to be “adopted” by an existing natural history collection.

In November of 2011, Eugene Young, a professor in the Agriculture and Life Sciences department at Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa, Okla. contacted the Sam Noble Museum about the possibility of adopting an orphaned collection from the A.D. Buck Museum.



Originally called the Yellow Bull Museum, the A.D. Buck Museum’s science exhibits included mounted specimens of birds and mammals. Sam Noble Museum curator Gary Schnell and collection managers Marcia Revelez and Tamaki Yuri traveled to the A.D. Buck Museum to view the specimens. Upon further inspection, the team found many specimens that had been on loan from the Sam Noble Museum.

A total of 14 specimens were loaned to A. D. Buck in 1961, including an adult grizzly bear, all still in good condition. Most of the collection’s Oklahoma birds and mammals were found in the early 1900s, such as the marsh hawk, in 1910, and a Pintail, in 1913.

Many of the specimens in the A. D. Buck collection are significant to Oklahoma’s history, such as the Spotted Skunk found in 1934 in Kay County, an area that had no previous record of having that species before the 1990s.  After evaluation, a crew returned in December to pack up the collection of birds and mammals and bring them to their new home at the Sam Noble Museum.

The A. D. Buck specimens are not the first collection the museum has adopted. Recently, the museum’s Department of Mammalogy adopted approximately 26,000 mammal species from the University of Memphis Mammal Collection.



“It’s an ongoing goal for the museum to aid orphaned collections,” Revelez said.

Natural history collections play a vital role in understanding cultures, habitats, biodiversity and more. They safeguard specimens, inspire, educate, and tirelessly continue the research and study of various sciences. We welcome back our mammals and birds that have been on loan for so many decades and will always strive to maintain and preserve Oklahoma’s rich natural history.

It’s National Volunteer Appreciation Week and the prefect time to talk about those people in the museum that make such an impact on staff, visitors and the community: our volunteers.

Every year, the museum dedicates this week to honoring volunteers for the hours they dedicate to natural history, to servicing the community and providing personal knowledge, assistance and experience to our visitors and staff.

In 2011, 161 volunteers dedicated 16,291 hours to the museum through their work as docents, with children in the Discovery Room or with staff behind the scenes.

We honored our volunteers at a reception this week, highlighting a particular volunteer who represented the volunteer core as a whole. He exemplified what it means to be a museum volunteer, serving for almost 12 years donating more than 3,100 hours to the museum. For that, Michael Laing received the 2012 Tom Siegenthaler Volunteer of the Year Award.

I am proud to know Michael and more important, thrilled that he represents a part of the museum that touches our visitors and staff alike. If you are interested in becoming a part of our museum, visit our website and browse the opportunities! (Click here)

I’d like to share a link with you to a new web page created for identifying Oklahoma fossils, www.CommonFossilsOfOklahoma.snomnh.ou.edu.

It’s packed with images of living plants and animals and their respective fossils, details about how paleontologists search for fossils, and ways to identifying Oklahoma fossils and learn about the communities these plants and animals came from.

If you’re in need of help identifying an object or fossil, submit a request, it’s easy!



Feel free to visit the site and learn something new about Oklahoma fossils!