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.

Ventastega curonica

From Science News, a newly described fossil gives evidence of the transition from fish to land-dwelling tetrapods. This is Ventastega curonica, from the late Devonian (365 million years ago) of Latvia, in a recent article in the journal Nature. It's the most primitive Devonian tetrapod, and is intermediate transitional form between Tiktaalik (our favorite early tetrapod) and the later Devonian tetrapods like Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. So I guess it's a fishomander, of sorts?

Alas! One more missing link means two more gaps in the fossil record!

Anyway, to stay on topic, here is the illustration being shown on all the news sites:

Illustration by Philip Renne - click for big

He looks so happy! I had to piece this together since most of the news sites are showing a cropped version sans the bottom-dwelling Bothriolepis in the background, and the only full-version I could find has poor resolution. And Philip Renne doesn't seem to have a website, unless all the media sites are mispelling his name, in which case, Philip, I appologize for my lack of link.

Anyway, I like the painting itself. It's colorful, has a nice balance, looks like it may have been designed for a book cover. But we're missing the most important part of the animal. The innovations of Ventastega are in its legs, and all we get to see here is the big smiley head! Man, that reflection on the eyeball is nice, though. And the angle is so dynamic; I feel like I'm right there in the water with him!

Here's an illustration from Devonian Times showing the nearly complete braincase, shoulder girdle, and partial pelvis:

Illustration by Dennis C. Murphy

Maybe the reason the illustrations don't show details of the foot is we don't have them represented by fossils.

I'd never browsed Devonian Times before; their illustrations have a lovely consistency: black sillouette with red bones. Check out the pages for Tiktaalik, Ventastega, Ichthyostega, and Acanthostega. The site makes it really easy to compare fossil forms. Though I would have put them in chronological and not alphabetical order.

I'm going to try to track down the full Nature article at the library this weekend, so hopefully another update on Ventastega will follow.

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!