The Hall of Ancient Life takes you on a tour of more than 4 billion years of Oklahoma's prehistory - from the formation of the planet through the last Ice Age. In this richly detailed gallery, the past comes to life through a series of exhibits featuring the most impressive specimens in the museum's extensive paleontology collections, plus spectacular models, interactives and detailed dioramas.

Highlights of this gallery include a lifelike walk-through Pennsylvanian coal swamp forest packed with plants and animals that lived in Oklahoma more than 300 million years ago, including Arthropleura, a six-foot-long ancestor of the modern millipede, and dragonflies with wingspans nearly two feet.

"The Clash of the Titans" is the centerpiece exhibit to the Hall of Ancient Life, featuring two Jurassic giants locked in a life or death battle. The combatants include the world's largest Apatosaurus and Saurophaganax maximus, a fearsome predator unique to Oklahoma. A ride in the museum's glass "dinovators" gives you the chance to see the Apatosaurus eye to eye.

Cretaceous exhibits include a mother Tenontosaurus protecting her young from a pair of marauding Deinonychus; and the breathtaking fully-articulated skeleton of Pentaceratops, whose ten-and-a-half-foot skull holds the Guinness World Record as the world's largest.

Finally, you will learn about the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and enter the Cenozoic Era, where you will see fossils of the ancient mammals of Oklahoma's Ice Age. These include a Columbian mammoth; Arctodus, the short-faced bear; and Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat.

When you leave this gallery, be sure to take a ride to the second floor in the "dino-vator" - a glass elevator that takes you up 26 feet to see the museum's mighty Apatosaurus eye to eye.