Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish)

The star of the 2008 Penn Reading Project and everyone's favorite tetrapod, Tiktaalik now has his own music video!

Music by the Indoorfins

Penn Reading Project

And here's a video interview with Tyler Keillor, the artist and fossil preparator who made the Tiktaalik model, which won the 2008 Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize for three-dimensional art.

Illustrating Turtle Evolution

New fossils of the earliest-known turtle, Odontochelys semitestacea ("toothed, half-shelled turtle"), have given new, and long searched-for, evidence of how turtle shells evolved. Press release here.

dorsal view

Here you can see the full plastron and the partial shell extensions which grew out to form the partial upper-shell. The take-home messages of this find are:

1. Odontochelys was likely aquatic
2. Odontochelys had a plastron (lower shell) but not a full carapace (upper shell)
3. Odontochelys had teeth! (all modern turtles have toothless beaks)
   

The challenge to the illustrator is to communicate all of these ideas in one image. Illustrator Marlene Hill Donnelly of the Field Museum in Chicago solved this problem in an efficient way: by drawing two turtles! One from above and one from below.

illustration by Marlene Hill Donnelly - click for big!

What a beautiful and bizarre looking creature! For more on turtle evolution, check out the UCMP Berkeley's page on anapsids here.

extra photo because turtles are awesome

Therapsid Evolution

I spotted this fantastic illustration of therapsid evolution by Carl Buell ("Olduvai George") over at Paleoblog. It's from the Donald R. Prothero book Evolution: What the Fossils say and Why it Matters, which has been in my Amazon 'wish list' for months. With illustrations like this, I pretty much have to click that "check out" button, now.

click for big!

It's similar to other line-of-descent drawings we've already looked at, but he's obviously done a few things here to make his version very dynamic. It reads from bottom-to-top instead of the standard left-to-right, and the pose changes from left to right-facing. Looking at this piece you can't help but see it as an animation, with the animal morphing as it roars and turns its head. Perhaps you even hear the sound of its vocalization change as it becomes more mammalian. How does it sound?

I don't even think he needed that motion blur to get the effect. In fact, if I wasn't as busy as I am, I'd take this thing into Photoshop and erase out the motion blur to prove it!

Amazing Dinosaur Puppetry

My new dream job is working in the studio for "Walking With Dinosaurs Live:"

Therizinosaur: Mystery of the Sickle-Claw Dinosaur

I just wanted to share a link to a recent Flagstaff Live article about an exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona on the dinosaur Therizinosaur which contains a lot of cool-looking paleoart:

Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk

Leshyk blends a strong fine arts background with studies in anatomy, physical science and natural history. As the current scientific illustrator at the Bilby Research Center at Northern Arizona University, and an educational background in both science and fine arts, he is well versed in detailed drawings by hand, computer-based images, and clay and wire models, all of which were involved in the Therizinosaur exhibit.

Check out those claws. I just love this guy's art. He even has a piece on convergent evolution (it's not part of this particular exhibition but by gosh, I had to show it):

Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk

Nice! So I guess if you live in the Flagstaff, AZ area, go check it out. Me, I'm too far away. : (

Is Paleoart Scientific?

After my Paleoartist of the Month post, I received an interesting email from the writer of Bloggasm (great name), who just interviewed James Gurney: Pencil journalism: An artist's attempt to depolarize the proselytizers. The interview covered the same post by Gurney that was featured last week on Pharyngula, where he shared his experience of inviting two Jehovah's Witnesses to sit down and allow him to sketch one of them.

It's nice that the post is getting him lots of attention, but personally I remain much more interested in the entries about art and technique and dinosaurs.

On that note, on May 27, Laelaps featured an interview with Paleoartist Michael Skrepnick, someone I already have in mind for a future PAotM. Skrepnick discusses how he became a paleoartist, as well as some of the challenges of reconstructing extinct animals, the techniques he uses, and the scientific validity of paleoart.

The interview reminded me of an interesting and slightly annoying conversation I had last year. In graduate school, I asked the professor of my Vertebrate Paleontology class, "Why are Parasaurolophus so often depicted with a fan of skin stretched under their head-crest?" Like so:

(painting by Rich Penney)

With a smirk, my professor said it was "because dinosaur artists need to make money." I was taken aback! So, of course, I had to bring up the subject the next time we were in the fossil lab together. I asked what he thought of reconstructions. He didn't like them! It's one thing to draw the bones, but once you start adding flesh and environment, you're bound to make mistakes, he asserted. I wish I could remember his exact words, but his point was that these types of illustrations are just artworks, not science.

Well, to an extent, I dissagree. Even something like this:

(from the Natural History Museum, if you can't tell)

...makes certain assumptions about the animal that future research could show to be wrong... placement of bones, posture, etc...(Actually I'm not sure how old this drawing is, but it looks painfully quadrupedal, doesn't it?)

And what's more, mistakes that have been made in the past, such as the idea that the Parasaurolophus crest was an air chamber or some kind of snorkel:

(from a very, very old book called "All About Dinosaurs")

... also existed in the literature. It wasn't a fanciful idea drawn up willy-nilly by a carried-away artist, but was rather illustrated based on what was believed by scientists about the fossil at the time.

I'll admit, as an artist who is partial to this kind of work, I'm probably biased. So I'll quote Michael Skrepnick from the above linked article:

Throughout the history of paleontology, paleo art has provided a reliable visual record, and essentially a "mirror" of progress within the science. Greater advances in technology, related disciplines, sheer volume of specimens and research, all reinforce an increasingly accurate assessment of ancient life on earth.

I'll admit Skrepnick might be biased, too, but I couldn't have said it better than that. Indeed we can confidently assume that the more we learn, the more accurate the art becomes. He continues:

Not so very long ago, snarling, upright theropods stalked slow, lumbering, swamp dwelling sauropods, incapable of walking unsupported on dry land. At the time, it was accepted, "cutting edge" science, today we have a much revised understanding of diversity and extremes in dinosaur evolution. Barriers have been broken, sauropods twice the size walk freely on land, tyrannosaurs have "tipped" forward, small theropods have feathers, psittacosaurs have "quills", etc. . .

Is our understanding now refined enough to offer a realistic vision of lost worlds ?

What I wonder, will today's " cutting edge " look like, in 2108 ? . . .

So what is the worth of paleoart? Yes it is fluid, and dynamic, and changes with scientific views and is bound to continue to change. But I think its real value lies in the way it captures the imagination of the general audience. Think especially of young people, whose early interest in science often begins with reading about fantastic prehistoric creatures. We owe it to them to make biological history exciting, to give it life and color and generally just more badass and cool. Here, have some more James Gurney to prove my point:

rrraarr!

Paleoartist of the Month

It's the first of June, which means it's time for Paleoartist of the Month! Each month I'll feature a favorite paleoartist based on some merits that I haven't decided yet. Right now, it's pretty random. Please feel free to submit ideas for July!

June's Paleoartist is James Gurney, who we all know as the artist behind Dinotopia:

The reason I chose Gurney for this month is because I just learned through Pharyngula that he has a blog which he updates almost daily. (Hey, he uses blogspot, too!) It's full of such useful information about illustration, color, light, form, style, that I've linked it on my own sidebar and will be checking it daily from now on. He even has a series of entries on Dino Art Tips!

• Dino Art Workshop
• Dino Art Workshop 2
• Dino Art Tips 3: Maquettes
• Dino Art Tips 4: Environment
• Dino Art Tips 5 : Five-foot Eye Level & Separating Light & Shadow

I wish I would have discovered this site months ago. Reading it has been a delight, and he shares his ideas and methods on a number of techniques. It always makes me happy to see people with amazing talent openly sharing what they do and how they do it. It's going to take me weeks to read through all the back entries!

What I particularly love about Gurney's work is how genuinely animal-like his dinosaurs appear. Even when they stand along side humans in the utopian cities of his Dinotopia books, their behavior and mannerisms are believable as fellow creatures who really did once live on this earth, and not monsters dreamed up in some fantasy.
And of course, to bring it all home, good paleoart (even when it's not strictly scientific) allows our imagination to flourish, and to feel the existence of these long-gone beings who once inhabited this very planet, losing out to natural selection in the long run but definitely leaving their mark.