The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble museum | Hacker News Reader

The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble museum

svpow.com

82 pointssurprisetalk8 comments

Huh, my first thought was, the Predator taking on dinosaurs would be a pretty cool movie: https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/bizarre-headgea...

I get Xenomorph queen look from the first image

Exactly!

Also, on further thought, I think the "Predator vs Dinosaurs" movie does exist, except it's not obvious at first glance. It's this Adam Driver movie called "65", and while the protagonist is obviously played by a human, the timeline (65 million years ago on Earth) and a couple of key scenes opens the interpretation that these are actually an alien species just portrayed by humans to make the narrative more relatable. In that interpretation, it's possible for this alien species to be an ancestor of the Predator species.

I thought we were moving toward depicting dinosaurs as having feathers? Or is there just too little evidence around what exactly that would look like to add it to visualizations?

To be fair, this is in Oklahoma so we're lucky they're depicting dinosaurs as real at all.

Just kidding. This museum is actually awesome. The staff was incredibly knowledgeable and friendly when I visited years ago (I went to college nearby).

If I remember correctly, one of the curators mentioned adding feathers to some of their more permanent exhibits when I was there. Maybe they are still working on expanding that and/or getting everyone on board? I'd love to hear their actual reasoning! I gotta go back and pester them about feathers.

"billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs and armoured dinosaurs did not have feathers because we have lots of skin impressions of these animals that clearly show they had scaly coverings" [1]

There is no evidence for example that protoceratops, whose skulls are pictured in the article, had feathers.

Non-avian theropods had feathers, but even then were not necessarily covered with them, it could be a few feathers under the arms. We are talking about species over a 200 million year time period.

[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/march/the-first-din...

When I read the title, I thought this was "headgear" as in dental appliances and tools. And to be honest, that would also be a cool exhibit.

Truly a head of its time. Badum bum.

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