laces across the country, and society at health. that is live next sunday, april 22 at 8:30 a.m. eastern here on american history tv. >> our c-span cities tour takes american history tv on the road to feature the history of cities across america. you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. the sam noble museum is building a history museum in the state of oklahoma. this is the hall of ancient life introducingdoes is people to the great diversity of life over time. there are some exhibits the show diversity from throughout the world and then as we move into this part, we are talking about

this. had a fascinating past, not just in human history but through the history of life and geological history. at one time, of course the continent went separated like they are now. oklahoma was at the tropics. oklahoma moved northward. before we get to modern times there was an ocean that formed between the western united states and the eastern united states. oklahoma was version that ocean. the eastern part of oklahoma were above water and western pressure above water. the middle was under a shallow sea. because of that, we have fossils from dinosaurs and organisms.

there are these do see organisms that develop and eventually, that ocean disappeared, become in the great plains and oklahoma became a grassland inessential part. we see all of those changes in this gallery. click skimming you this overview of the museum. some of the to find most spectacular specimens of dinosaurs. many of these in oklahoma. i'm going to turn this over to my curator. he will be able to give you the story of some of these great specimens. >> we jump to a letter. is beforeeozoic, this the biggest message station of all-time. early life on land.

oklahoma is really famous for fossil records. this is when we were just a couple south of the equator and the landmasses were all united in the giant supercontinent. this guy here is dmitry. i-5 him in the pack with your dinosaur sets. this is a member of the group of reptiles that give rise to mammals. you can see he has a great big head and sharp teeth. he was the top editor of his time by 280 million years ago or so. we have some other things in here. we try to make a community. these animals would be alive in oklahoma. this is often the right. he has a spine but dorsal. you can see little spice coming off of this right now. eater, a granola

munching plant eater. over here we have one of the early amphibians. this is like a salamander on steroids. he is pictured out of the water. they probably lived mainly in the water. you can see person for next to him is one of those giant dragonflies. they are found in northern oklahoma and southern kansas. over here, this one is only known from the norman area. this thing has a terrible name. oklahoma and southern kansas. found them when they were building the section road. is a pre-strange looking thing. he has a great big old chest. these things are plant eaters. they did not shoot after love. they fermented the throne. there is a huge got area and a relatively tiny head.

basically, responsible for only grabbing and swallowing of. not much else going on there. exhibits, we try to emphasize communities directly found in oklahoma or the adjacent area. we jump to the dresser. it is about 150 million years ago. at purdue much any north american museum, you will find life from the late jurassic. formationa, that reaches its salvation most exposure. we have animals that are unique to oklahoma. we have a giant apatosaurus. if you stress that tell out, it would be 92 feet long or something like that. it

really quite an impressively large sauropad. interestingly, we found that together, these bones of a juvenile. these are very uncommon. it's funny, and i should tell you that most of this material, all this material is collected in the late 1930's as a result of the w.p.a. project. and so we were assembling these collections, just lickety-split, and they didn't have time to prepare them or anything so. when i came about 30 years ago in the late 1980's, we were unwrapping these bones for the first time, and i can tell you the bones of this baby is really cool. you could follow day-to-day, you could follow day-to-day the baby lindbergh kidnapping or the hindenburg disaster, period newspapers in the 1930's. and it wasn't until we unwrapped these and thought, oh, my goodness, these are not just franchise tag ams of small

bones, these are baby dinosaurs. so we mounted this definitely after we added it to the larger exhibit. and do they are for their young? we simply don't know. also in this exhibit, this is interesting. don't know. also in this this is a thigh bone. the skeleton itself, we used a restoration, but this is real bone, and you can see the patina on it. this is like a buddhist foot that's been rubbed by countless hands, and this is schoolchildren coming by, thousands and thousands of time, making it nice and smooth. you can see there's some scratches. those are actually chisel marks from the w.p.a. workers. they did not have a great deal of background in preparing the fossils. just right next to it, as long as we're here, it's my very favorite fossil in the whole exhibit. unfortunately,

they mounted it up and down rather than the way it was lined. this is a rib, ok? and it was found lying like that, and you can see it's got this bend in it. it's a fair supposition that this bone was lying on a mud flat and another dinosaur stepped on it. so that's just kind of really neat thing. it makes you think of these animals as living organisms. this is a foot. the large alosaur, it's unique found in this area. very large animal. that's just kind of really neat so we put the actual bones right in here. you can see where we had to put these together. we had a whole community of animals n. other cases, we have select specimens, and this is one such instance. here we have the skull of a very small dinosaur where we had to put these to actually one of the oldest members of the so-called horned

dinosaur family, except you can see it doesn't have any horns. at this stage, there were no horns, you can see in the restoration, just a little hint of the frill in the back of the ead. this is about the size of the animal. probably was not completely full grown, but it was not a baby, either. so this is a the animal. very, very small dinosaur. and we found that in the late 1990's in montana, and we suppose that it probably occurred in southeastern oklahoma, but we simply don't know. exhibited here, the scum, the way it was actually found. and then with some restored pieces put in, and then 3-d composite done where it's stretched out from its istortion. over here, that's one of the very smallest and earliest and most primitive members was horned dinosaur

group. here's one of the largest. this is the largest skull of any terrestrial animal ever known. it's close to 11 feet long. and you can see the brow horns up above the orbits. they're about three feet long, very impressive. the largest ndividual. this one is mounted, as much real bone as e could put together. we had a guy that frill, the back part of the head, that was in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle size pieces. and we had a guy guy that frill, the back part spend, oh, about 3,000 hours putting that together. you can see we've got parts of the skeleton restored, but most of it's there, and you can see the ribs. they're not fully straightened out. they're not always complete. that's what we had. we wanted to look like what we have, not what we imagine it to be. what's cool about this specimen, it's in charging

osition. you can see the horns have been pointed straight out, and that shield is up, the frill is up. and you can imagine that must have been pretty intimidating, seeing have been pointed straight out, 1-foot-long head and three giant horns pointed at you. >> this museum was built with the support of the people of oklahoma and the people of norman and private donors. the university got involved in the project, but this was after the people had been pushing it forward. it's a institution in oklahoma. how beloved, you might add. when the football stadium wanted to expand, the university wanted to add a football stayed dwroum a bond issue that was being completed for the museum and the people ose up and said no, that was for the museum. in oklahoma, football is king. but apparently this museum can play a role as king, too. people really love the institution.

>> university of richmond professor talks about how children were affected during the civil war era and compares this history to the continuing 21st problem of war, children, and refugees. this hour long talk from the american civil war museum's symposium is cohosted by the library of virginia in richmond. the american civil war museum. and the university of virginia center for civil war history.