Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs E-Book

Emily Willoughby

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 330

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

People of all ages are fascinated by dinosaurs. Though their huge skeletons are an impressive sight, much of our sense of childlike wonder comes from artistic depictions of them in books, museum murals and popular culture. This book is about how such 'paleoart' is created, and the process of integrating scientific findings with artistic principles to produce accurate, expressive and arresting artworks of dinosaurs and the world they lived in. Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs explores the anatomy and ecology of different types of dinosaurs including Deinonychus, Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex. It demonstrates how to interpret paleontological research through the lens of an artistic depiction with examples. There are over 250 illustrations feature pencil drawings, gouache, oil paint, and digital media. Step-by-step projects demonstrate the use of both traditional and digital media, the use of unique techniques and sources of reference, and building up dinosaur anatomy from basic shapes. Finally, it gives insight into how paleoart can be a means to advance knowledge through scientific analysis and prediction. With explorations of dinosaur anatomy, unique techniques for reference and a series of how-to instructions, this book will guide an aspiring paleoartist in learning how to breathe life into the past through art.

Leseprobe

Stenonychosaurus Pair (acrylic). A mated pair of Stenonychosaurus, formerly known as Troodon, survey their Late Cretaceous environment amidst horsetails, the conifer Elatides, and hemiphlebiid damselflies, all known from the Hell Creek formation of western North America.

First published in 2021 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

This e-book first published in 2021

© Emily Willoughby 2021

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 956 3

Cover design: Sergey Tsvetkov

Dedication

For my dad, who gave me a love of all things feathered.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the friends, family and colleagues without whom this book would not have been possible. I’d especially like to thank Jonathan Kane, whose conscientious editorial critiques have provided enormous improvements to the text, and whose beautiful palaeontology-themed poetry expresses the same reverence and wonder for dinosaurs that I try to express through art. Your editorial commentary, artistic feedback and content suggestions have been invaluable to its quality.

Thanks also to my family, particularly my parents Dave and Julie Willoughby and my grandmother Cherie Willoughby, who gave me a great appreciation for that beautiful group of modern dinosaurs – that is, birds – from an early age, and to my friends and colleagues David Zimmerman, Eric Liskay, and Alice Heurlin, and Tracy Brown for weathering the many versions of various in-progress artworks and chapters I’ve shared for feedback and advice. Your encouragement has been instrumental to this book, as have the patience and personal kindness you’ve shown me throughout its creation.

Finally but not least, I would like to express my gratitude for all of the palaeontological researchers who have generated the wealth of knowledge upon which my own palaeoart depends. In particular, collaborative opportunities and palaeoartistic feedback from palaeontologists Darren Naish, Andrea Cau, Mark Witton, Robert DePalma, William Parsons and many others too numerous to list have been instrumental to my development as a palaeoartist. My heartfelt thanks to all, and to the many unnamed researchers whose work I have referenced, and sometimes illustrated, over the years and within this book.

Image Credits

All images and photographs are by Emily Willoughby unless otherwise noted here. Chapter 1: Photograph of Microraptor by Hone et al. (2010), CC BY 2.5. Chapter 2: Skeletal reconstruction of Balaur by Jaime Headden, CC BY 4.0; photograph of left foot of Balaur fossil by Ghedoghedo, CC BY-SA 3.0); wind tunnel photographs by Evangelista, D. et al. (2014), CC BY 3.5. Chapter 3: Photograph of Mei fossil by Bruce McAdam, Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, CC BY-SA 2.0. Chapter 4: Photograph of Archaeopteryx fossil by H. Raab, CC BY-SA 3.0. Chapter 5: Photograph of Zhenyuanlong fossil by Junchang Lü & Stephen L. Brusatte, CC BY 4.0. Chapter 6: Photograph of ‘Sue’ fossil forearm by Wikimedia Commons user Evolutionnumber9, CC BY-SA 4.0; Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus skull diagram by Jørn H. Hurum and Karol Sabath, CC BY 2.0; Photograph of Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus skeletal mounts by Matthew Dillon, CC BY 2.0. Chapter 8: ‘Tetrapteryx’ illustration by William Beebe (1915), public domain; cladogram showing feather distribution in Dinosauria by Wikimedia Commons user Kiwi Rex, with phylogeny and integument description based on Benton et al. (2019), and silhouettes from works by Slate Weasel, Matt Martyniuk, Audrey.m.horn, Tom Parker, Michael B. H. and Gareth Monger (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Why Paint Dinosaurs?

Chapter 2 Interpreting the Scientific Research

Chapter 3 Starting a Drawing

Chapter 4 Composition and Environment

Chapter 5 Terrible Claws and Beautiful Plumes

Chapter 6 Cretaceous Carnivore Kings

Chapter 7 Giants of Questionable Gentleness

Chapter 8 Dinosaurs Are Not Extinct

Appendix A Further Reading

Appendix B Glossary

Index

Introduction

Palaeoart is a specific genre of naturalistic visual art that focuses uniquely on life that lived and died before human history. It shares many of its principles with any genre of visual art, such as the importance of composition, perspective, colour and light, and more still with other genres of naturalistic art, such as wildlife and bird painting. Artistic principles relevant to the creation of any visually interesting and anatomically accurate naturalistic art apply equally to the production of palaeoart.

Four Layers of Deinonychus (digital): Bone, muscle, skin and feathers.

Palaeoart, however, is an unusual discipline of naturalistic art, with a number of principles that make it different from other genres of art. Throughout this book, I will not typically devote much space to broad structural advice such as the use of colour, light, rules of composition, and exploring different types of paint and material, although such principles will of course be brought to bear whenever they are relevant (and they are rarely not). Instead, I want to teach readers some things they perhaps cannot learn from other instructional manuals on painting and drawing. Nevertheless, many of these basic principles will take on a unique life of their own when viewed through the lens of palaeoart, such as (for one example among many) the need to choose realistic, biologically inspired colour schemes for dinosaurs and the environments they lived in.

As this book is intended to be educational as well as instructive, the first use of each term that refers to a specific paleontological or geologic concept will appear in bold, indicating that a definition can be found in the Glossary at the end of the book. Most of these terms will be defined in context, so readers need not be poisted at the glossary to understand unfamiliar terminology. Additionally, each genus of dinosaur that is discussed in any amount of depth will be accompanied by a side box with basic statistics about the dinosaur: What its name means, how big it is, where and when it lived. As my knowledge, interest and technique have centred around feathered dinosaurs for most of my career, these too will be the focus of many of the examples I use for general principles. For this I ask the forgiveness of readers who may pick up this book hoping to find explicit how-to instructions on how to draw Parasaurolophus, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, or other popular favourite dinosaurs. Rest assured that the principles and examples are broadly generalizable to any type of dinosaur you wish to draw. (And yes, there is a section on T. rex.)

I will start with an exploration of the basic goals and motivations behind the creation of palaeoart. Among other things, the desire to depict dinosaurs as animals like any other – rather than exaggerated movie monsters or mythical creatures – is paramount. Alongside this desire is the understanding that every fossil the earth gives up to palaeontological science represents a distinct individual animal with its own unique existence on this planet. A given fossil will often show signs of this unique life – a broken toe that has healed over, preserved contents of a last meal in the stomach cavity, or arms outstretched over a nest to shield it from a sandstorm – that beg to be illustrated. So, too, are the circumstances of death – which often led to fossilization itself – often unique and interesting. Palaeoart is, therefore, not only an educational tool but a sort of homage to the dead, and this makes it unlike any other genre of visual art. This principle is a running theme throughout my own art, and will be as well throughout this book. Chapter 2 is devoted to the importance of reading and interpreting the scientific research about dinosaurs, as this research serves as the basis for all of the public’s understanding about these magnificent ancient creatures. We overview different types of research papers in palaeontology, which will serve as in-depth overview of certain techniques that are unique to palaeoart, with a focus on the need to gather resources and the importance of scientific accuracy, respectively. Chapter 2 will emphasize the importance of reading, understanding and synthesizing the basics of palaeontological research papers, the use of skeletal diagrams and reconstructions, and the salience of evolutionary principles in creating effective palaeoart.

In Chapter 3, we will approach the process of beginning a piece of palaeoart by applying the principles of research-based reference we’ve overviewed in the previous chapter. Here we will start with a discussion of how to interpret a fossil and how to draw from a well-preserved fossil or a skeleton that has been created by a special type of palaeoartist trained to do this. This will begin with basic shape and anatomical principles up through the artistic representation of the form and function you want to communicate with a drawing of a dinosaur. In Chapter 4, we will place these tools in the context of a realistic and consistent environment, exploring the utility of photography and observation alongside research as artistic reference.

Sinosauropteryx (watercolour and pencil).

Chapters 5 to 8 will apply the principles covered in the first half in an exploration of four broad categories of dinosaurs: Small, feathered hyper-carnivores like Deinonychus; hulking, powerful carnivores like Tyrannosaurus; the giant, horned and long-necked herbivores such as Diplodocus and Triceratops, and finally, the many beautiful and bizarre dinosaurs that have played a role in our understanding of the evolutionary pathways that led to modern birds, such as the famous ‘first bird’ Archaeopteryx. Each of these chapters will include various step-by-step explorations in a variety of media, including traditional media such as gouache paint as well as digital painting. Several of these chapters also include a simplified step-by-step process to drawing the basic body plan of well-known dinosaurs from basic shapes. For each process, I will start with a specific genus that has been important to advancing palaeontological science. We will then explore the anatomy, ecosystem, evolutionary position, and behavioural clues that are relevant to this individual dinosaur as we build up from thumbnails and anatomy studies to detail and environment.

Although the palaeoart genre covers any extinct life throughout Earth’s history up until the emergence of human history, this book will focus on dinosaurs that lived during the Mesozoic era, which lasted from about 250 to 66 million years ago. Although I will sometimes refer to other times and other groups that lived alongside dinosaurs, I will not cover extinct mammals, pterosaurs, or other reptiles in any amount of detail. The vastness and diversity of dinosaurs alone is such that we could not possibly cover even the major groups in a single book. However, I hope and intend that you take away from it a valuable toolkit of ideas, strategies and techniques that you will be able to apply to any type of dinosaur that interests you most. The joy of drawing dinosaurs comes from a fascination and wonder at these strange, ancient animals that inhabits us all, especially as children. To combine this childlike wonder with the scientific rigour of palaeoart is what enables us to imagine a T. rex or a Diplodocus as a real animal that actually once walked upon this world, and to put this imagination down on a canvas. As long as you have retained that sense of wonder, these are tools that anyone can learn how to use, regardless of experience or background in either art or science.

Brachiosaurus (oil paint)

And so, let us begin the strange and fascinating journey of drawing and painting dinosaurs.

CHAPTER 1

Why Paint Dinosaurs?

The mission and joy of a life in palaeoart

Imagine: The dream of twentieth-century science fiction has finally been realized, and time travel to the distant past is now possible. You have been chosen to travel back to the Cretaceous period, which represents a span of time from about 145 to 66 million years ago. In particular, your task is to journey to the Early Cretaceous of midwestern North America to study one of the most iconic of all predatory dinosaurs: Deinonychus, the ‘terrible claw’. As you watch a family group of Deinonychus rest near a riverbank, you jot down notes and sketches in your notebook – from a safe distance, of course. What are the first things you notice about their form and behaviour? What surprises you the most about what you’re observing?

The Noble Savage (digital): We do not know for certain what the dromaeosaur dinosaur Deinonychus looked like during life, but it must have been splendid, beautiful and dangerous.

The first thing that may surprise you is how birdlike they appear. Popular culture’s history of scaled, reptilian monstersaurs did not prepare you for the sleek, curved predators you’re watching now as they preen their feathers and perhaps nestle their snouts into their wings as they sleep. Yes, they appear to have wings – or, at least, longer feathers that fill the lines of their forearms and hands.

And yet, as you watch for longer, you start to notice that despite their birdiness, there are many things about them that are also noticeably un-birdlike. Although they are covered with feathers, they appear far shaggier than your typical sparrow, with downward-drooping filaments extending from their wings and tail. Their arms, though winglike at first blush, are not folded tightly across their backs as a modern bird’s would be. They are held forward or along the sides at rest, with the shoulder joint appearing near the front of their sleek, thin chests, quite unlike the massive, muscular keel of flying avians. But the most striking thing to you about these unusual wing-arms is the massive, flexible meat hooks you can see below the wings where the hands would be. These hands are not for flying – they are weapons.

Deinonychus Field Guide (gouache): If you were to observe and sketch out a Deinonychus in the field (from a safe distance!), it might look something like this.

As you watch, you begin to notice other aspects of the animal’s anatomy that have clearly been honed by evolution for the purpose of predation. You see the feature it was named for: The mighty recurved scythe on the second digit of the foot, held aloft and ‘cocked back’ as though poised for motion. Although it’s different from anything you’ve seen in modern birds, you notice a similarity to the feet of birds of prey, like eagles. If you are lucky enough to witness the animals perching on the branch of a tree, you notice another difference in the feet from those of modern birds: Deinonychus does not have a reversed hallux, the backwards-facing, opposable toe that modern birds use to grip a tree branch. Instead, a perching Deinonychus would grasp primarily with that terrible claw, and it would likely be more comfortable on the ground than in a tree.

What Colour is a Dinosaur? (gouache and digital): A snapshot of a possible moment in time as a mother Anchiornis feeds her young 160 million years ago, in what is now Liaoning, northern China.

Hurried and excited, you block out the basic shapes of the animal’s form before you as it sits back on its haunches on a low-hanging dead branch, perilous claws digging in for purchase. You note the similarities and differences between this magnificent animal and the sparrows you’re accustomed to seeing in your garden. As you sketch, the fine details of feather patterns and the long sweeping lines of its back and tail begin to emerge, along with the elegant S-curve of its neck, the wicked hooks of its claws, and finally, the gleaming, intelligent eye of a watchful predator. How wonderful and exciting to observe and document such a creature in the flesh!

But observing this awesome animal in the field is something we will probably never do. And this is why we do palaeoart.

DEINONYCHUS ANTIRRHOPUS

Name means: ‘Counterbalancing terrible claw’

Discovered by: John Ostrom (1969)

Family: Dromaeosauridae

Clade: Theropoda

Time period: Mid-Aptian to early Albian stages of the Early Cretaceous period, about 115–108 million years ago

Location: Fossils have been recovered from the Cloverly, Cedar Mountain and Antlers Formations of modern-day Montana, Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma

Size: Over 3m long

Scale comparison with human.

IS PALAEOART ART, OR IS IT SCIENCE?

The impossibility of this scenario, as wonderous as it would be to experience, is precisely why palaeoart is such an important field of scientific illustration. The fact that we cannot passively observe dinosaurs as they were means that we need to apply principles of scientific inference to our visual representations of them instead. If we could travel back in time to the Mesozoic era, there would be no need to bring even a sketchbook – a simple camera would suffice. There would be, then, no mystery as to how dinosaurs really looked when they were alive.

But that mystery is why palaeoart is such a fascinating and, indeed, uniquely important genre of naturalistic art. More than any other field of scientific illustration, palaeontological reconstruction straddles the line between science and art, and it requires a firm grasp on the principles of each in order to effectively communicate through this medium.

In the next three chapters, I will carefully step through the process of collecting and interpreting information from research, understanding and representing the form and function of the dinosaur you want to illustrate, and the life appearance, behaviour, and environment most realistic to the evidence at this time. The process of creating palaeoart is one that starts with the discovery of a fossil, and proceeds through a series of interacting steps of scientific understanding and artistic interpretation. Though the process varies depending on specifics – for example, how much of the skeleton was found – it typically follows a few definite steps.

First, the fossil is collected, cleaned, preserved, and stored. At this point the palaeontologists usually have a good idea of what kind of dinosaur the bones belong to, but they often don’t know for sure until the bones are studied carefully in the lab and compared to similar bones from other specimens. It might be a new species, or a new specimen of a known species. Then, a team of palaeontologists – usually the discoverer and colleagues – formally identify and describe the bones in a scientific paper.

That’s where the palaeoartist comes in. If I’m interested in this particular fossil, I’ll have to read the scientific paper and try to figure out what the palaeontologists’ description of the bones they found reveal about its anatomy, its closest relatives, its environment and ecosystem, and even its behaviour. Sometimes there will be drawings or skeletal diagrams of the bones in the paper, but not always. At this point I’ll have an idea of how I want to depict the dinosaur, so I’ll collect references and then start working on a composition!

Palaeoart is both science and art, but the important role of scientific inference does not mean there is no room for creative expression. Creativity is always necessary for the composition and stylistic elements of a drawing or painting. The scientific aspect always involves some creativity as well, but the amount required depends a lot on the dinosaur and the fossil material it’s known from. I’ll give some examples. Microraptor, a pigeon-sized feathered theropod dinosaur, is known to scientists from several exquisitely preserved, fully articulated skeletons. Some of these fossil skeletons are so finely preserved by volcanic ash that the animal almost appears on the rock slab as it would have right after it died.

The first discovered fossil of Microraptor gui. This shows the preserved feathers (white arrow) and the ‘halo’ around the specimen where they appear to be absent (black arrows). Scale bar at 5cm. Photograph from Hone et al. (2010).

When it comes to life appearance, Microraptor is one of the very best known of all dinosaurs. We have an incredible wealth of information from these fossils, including the knowledge of how its feathers were arranged, the precise shape of each flight feather, and even the pigment cells within the feathers! But this doesn’t mean that creativity isn’t required to illustrate it. We still have to come up with a unique pose, angle, behaviour, and situation. Microraptor was very birdlike, but there is nothing quite like it alive today. It had long flight feathers on its legs as well as its arms and on its long, bony tail. How did it carry these strange structures in life? How would it have been able to move over the ground or through trees with such wings? How did it hunt, attract mates or fend off predators? These and many other questions will always keep an element of creativity in palaeoart, regardless of how much we are able to learn from fossils.

Italian palaeontologist Andrea Cau once wrote that dinosaurs ‘are not living beings, they are explanations for the fossil record’. Although of course the fossils we have of dinosaurs represent animals that really did once live, Andrea is correct in that our concept of a given dinosaur at any given time is actually just the best hypothesis we have at that moment for reconciling the existing data on that particular animal. For Microraptor, the data that we have are vast, and so a modern concept of Microraptor that takes into account all of that data is certainly more ‘correct’ than one that doesn’t. But it is still just a hypothesis, an explanation that may change in the future with more or better data. As such, palaeoart that is ‘most correct’ today will almost certainly not be correct in the future. That might be a disappointment for aspiring palaeoartists, but let me assure you – like science in general, the process of discovery and revision is most of the fun.

MICRORAPTOR GUI

Name means: ‘Gui’s small one who seizes’

Discovered by: Xu Xing (2003)

Family: Dromaeosauridae

Clade: Theropoda

Time period: Aptian stage of the Early Cretaceous period, about 120 million years ago

Location: All known specimens hail from the Jiufotang Formation of modern Liaoning, China

Size: About a metre long

Scale comparison with human.

LIKE NATURALISTS OF OLD

Palaeoart changes alongside and with the science of palaeontology. Like the subjects it studies, the methods of palaeontological reconstruction are old: we must paint, sculpt and draw to bring these animals to life. We are like the intrepid wildlife illustrators of the 1700s and prior, only with an additional limitation in that we cannot directly observe our subjects. John James Audubon painted birds in the field, but he also collected dead specimens for study and reconstruction. We have dead specimens in the form of fossils, to be sure – but we have to be the ones to layer the bones with flesh and muscle and behaviour. But palaeoartists are not limited merely to bones. We have to know how to layer the bones, and for that we have the entirety of biological science at our disposal, from ornithology, evolutionary biology, to palaeontology itself. The best bird photographer in the world doesn’t have to know anything about the biology and anatomy of a bird to capture breathtaking photographs, but a palaeoartist can only be successful if he truly understands the animal he’s painting. In that, the palaeoartist is the perfect melding of scientist and artist, the only one of its kind that really exists in the modern day.

Caudipteryx with Chicks (digital). This snapshot from the Early Cretaceous Yixian of Liaoning, China, depicts a Caudipteryx zoui mother and her two chicks darting across a shallow riverbed to the safety of denser cover beyond. In the background, a pair of shaggy tyrannosauroid Yutyrannus try to decide if they ought to be interested, and a pair of Changchengornis, a confuciusornithid basal bird, glide by. Together, the three genera represent a wide span on the continuum of feathered dinosaurs and of feather complexity: from hulking, filamentous carnivore, to ground-bound, display-feathered oviraptorosaur, to flight-capable bird.

In ‘classical’ palaeoart from the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, dinosaurs were usually painted as slow, plodding, tail-dragging behemoths. Most of the dinosaurs we knew about back then were huge and totally unlike anything alive today – Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus, for example – and the theory of evolution and its implications were only dimly understood by scientists at a time when Darwin had only recently penned it. The depiction of dinosaurs as cold-blooded, sluggish lizards began to change in the late 1960s with what we now refer to as the ‘Dinosaur Renaissance’, which was sparked by the discovery of my favourite dinosaur in 1969 by John Ostrom – the ‘raptor’ dromaeosaurDeinonychus. Though Deinonychus was much larger than modern birds, its skeleton was so obviously birdlike that Ostrom and others began to champion the view that modern birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs and that, like birds, dinosaurs may have been active, warm-blooded, and complex in their behavioural lives.

Today, we know almost beyond the possibility of doubt that Ostrom was right. We have so many fossils of feathered dinosaurs that some palaeontologists think that most groups of dinosaurs had feathers, and not just the birdlike theropods that I most enjoy painting. Thanks to these many relatives, we can fill in a lot of missing pieces that apply generally to all dromaeosaurs, just as the discovery of a new Panthera bone from an extinct species would allow us to assume, thanks to our knowledge of tigers and lions, that it was probably covered in tawny fur and liked to eat deer or antelope when it was alive. Since the Dinosaur Renaissance, there has been an increasing trend in palaeoart towards not only striving for accuracy in how a depiction represents known fossil evidence, but also in making dinosaurs look real – like animals that actually once lived on Earth and went about their daily business like any other animal alive today.

The importance of Deinonychus in reshaping our modern scientific understanding of dinosaurs cannot be overstated. Its discovery by John Ostrom launched a minor scientific revolution that led to the firm conclusion that birds evolved from dinosaurs, to an understanding of dinosaurs as warm-blooded and behaviourally complex, and to the rebranding of dinosaurs in the minds of the public through cultural phenomena like Jurassic Park. And, as far as I’m concerned, Deinonychus may well have been the most beautiful animal that ever lived. This wolf-sized, birdlike carnivore was a pure embodiment of predatory grace, from its long, sleek skull to the enormous, scythe-like ‘terrible claw’ for which it was named. There could be no better emblem for the scientific progress represented by palaeontology and palaeoart.

Deinonychus (gouache). This mid-sized dromaeosaur, described by John Ostrom in 1969, has for good reason become an emblem of how scientific progress in palaeontology has deepened our understanding of the ancient natural world.

For these reasons, Deinonychus is by far the dinosaur I have the most experience illustrating, and it will serve as the poster dinosaur for many of the principles and concepts that are demonstrated throughout the book.

AN HOMAGE TO THE DEAD

Dinosaur art is a curious passion, because it seems like such a strange, challenging and niche field of illustration to many people. So, why paint dinosaurs? Animals like Deinonychus and Microraptor, in all of their splendour and strangeness, best capture the appeal and the necessity of palaeoart. Palaeontology is the only field of science that requires art to communicate its findings to the public. We cannot rely on photography, nature footage, or bone measurements to represent the concept of a dinosaur in a human brain. The artist must interpret the science and understand the animal to bring it back to life, and it is the public appreciation brought about by these depictions – in museums, in film, in books – that largely funds the science of palaeontology as a whole. Palaeontology would not exist in its current form without palaeoart.

Talos sampsoni (digital). This tiny birdlike dinosaur was found in the Kaiparowits Formation of modern Utah. The described specimen of this derived troodontid had an interesting feature, which is that the sickle claw-bearing toe of the left foot had been broken in life, including a surface lesion, and had then healed. The authors speculate that the toe may have been damaged in some sort of physical trauma or infection. A popular theory is that it was damaged in the act of predation, though that remains a speculative idea.

Deinonychus (oil paint).

And our obligation isn’t only to the public, either – it’s also to the animals themselves, and to the individual existences each one experienced. Every piece of accurate palaeoart is based on knowledge drawn from specific specimens, and often entire species are represented only by a single fragment of skeleton. Each fossil specimen, for all of its rich wealth of knowledge, represented an individual animal with its own experiences, personality and set of behaviours that made it unique. The Talos specimen, for instance, represents everything we know about that taxon, from its phylogenetic placement to its proportions and anatomy. Yet it wasn’t just a ‘species’, it was also an individual – a creature whose fossil shows that it had a partially healed injury to the toe when it died. What events might have led to its injury? How did it die? And more importantly, how did it live?

Caudipteryx with chicks (watercolour and coloured pencil).

Of all the living things that have come and gone upon this planet, we will only ever know a tiny fraction of them. As a palaeoartist, it is our unique responsibility to make sure that these creatures are not forgotten to the dust of time. Through art, the public can come to know dinosaurs as they were, not as movie monsters or fantasy creatures, but as real animals that snorted, snuffled, farted, mated, itched, hurt, lived, and died.

NOT FORGOTTEN

By Jonathan Kane

Be peaceful, sleeping dragon, and sleep well,

And may your slumber bring you pleasant dreams.

Reality is harsher than it seems,

But dreaming visions do not have to tell

That when you go to sleep tonight you never shall arise.

The downy quilt of ash will keep you warm,

And also grant you rest without an end,

Your silence from the eons to defend,

And perfectly preserve your sleeping form,

So you are not forgotten, for your shut-forever eyes.

Take heart, devoted parent, guard your nest,

And may your care protect it from the storm.

Be steadfast as you watch the land transform,

And thus is your fidelity expressed,

Although your dedication’s goal you never shall attain.

When rapid flows of sand begins to rise,

You still preserve your unborn progeny,

As you are joined with them eternally,

Recording what your honor must comprise,

So you are not forgotten, though your nurture was in vain.

Be bold, courageous hunter, seek your prey,

Although it is a dark and stormy night,

And on the sliding hillside where you fight

Are dangers that exist no other day,

And which no prey or predator is able to outrun.

Against your hunger fear can make no gain,

Your claws do well to hold your quarry still,

Are held more firmly by the shifting hill,

To set in stone what danger you disdain,

So you are not forgotten, for your battle lost and won.

Be patient, wise explorer, search the field,

And do not overlook what may be there,

For any tooth or fragment in your care

Might cause a hidden tale to be unsealed,

And help you in your duty of remembering the dead.

The citizens of eras that are old

Have lived their lives, and perished in the act,

But still their marks on time remain intact,

Awaiting one whose wisdom could behold.

You must assist their stories to be told,

So they are not forgotten, for the purposes they led.

CHAPTER 2

Interpreting the Scientific Research

How to understand and apply palaeontological findings to palaeoart

The basic principles of all visual art apply to palaeoart. Although some artists consider the sole purpose of palaeontological illustration to be the presentation of an animal as dryly and conservatively as possible, that is certainly not the only approach, and is rarely the one that I prefer. Although a given job might require simplicity and conservative reconstruction, I think most palaeoart afficionados will find that the most moving dinosaur artwork they come across is that which commands elements of aesthetic effect in visual art: An elegant and cohesive composition, accurate and effective lighting and shadows, balanced use of colour, and so on.

Balaur bondoc is a Bird (digital): Was the dinosaur Balaur a vicious killer or a gentle bird? Interpreting the scientific literature is essential for reasoned, accurate palaeoart.

Because these principles are universally applicable to art of any subject, here I will focus on sources of reference and information that are more unique to the creation of palaeoart. Perhaps the most obvious and necessary of these sources is that which many aspiring palaeoartists find most daunting: The scientific literature itself.

Almost everything we know about how dinosaurs looked and behaved comes from fossils that are millions of years old. Although fully articulated, complete fossil skeletons are among the most beautiful and arresting of all sources of information palaeontology can use, they are also relatively rare. In many cases, a new genus of dinosaur might be described from a single bone. In other cases, a genus might be known from a variety of skeletal elements from multiple sites and multiple individuals, but with major diagnostic elements – such as the skull – highly fragmentary and sometimes even completely unknown. In still other cases a deposit might contain fragmented elements from specimens of different ages, such that it is difficult to piece together which elements belong to which individuals.

For someone without a background in the natural sciences, collecting and reading journal publications about dinosaurs can at first seem like an impossible task. It is very tempting, at least when one is starting out, to forgo engagement in the primary literature and instead use Wikipedia, dinosaur books, and other people’s palaeoart as reference. My experience has been that Wikipedia is often surprisingly accurate in its coverage of dinosaur genera, and often includes reference links to original studies and sometimes even photographs and illustrations created by professionals.

While these types of references are often fine, especially as practice, the benefit to learning how to interpret a published study cannot be overstated. Though the learning curve may seem steep at first, chances are it will be easier than you think, especially once you get past the jargon. Among other things, it is important to learn how to ferret out the parts of a paper that are relevant to a piece of palaeoart from the parts that, while often interesting, are often not as crucial to a planned reconstruction.

Here I’ll discuss some of the major types of published palaeontological research, what to look for in interpreting findings in terms that are applicable to an artwork, and some key definitions to terms that will help you wade through technical jargon. For each of the following type of study, I will give an example of a palaeoart illustration I’ve done that fits each category, and the steps that went into producing it.

DESCRIPTIONS OF NEW DINOSAURS

Most of us are familiar at least in passing with the idea of a newly discovered dinosaur being published (or ‘described’) for the first time. Sometimes the publication of a new dinosaur genus will be interesting enough that the popular media will interview the authors and reduce the discovery to a few paragraphs of text intended for the general public. These popular press accounts vary considerably in their accuracy and detail, but for a palaeoartist, there is always a wealth of information lost in such a news portrayal.

Most (though not all) noteworthy publications of a new type of dinosaur happen at the genus level. This means that the new paper will be making its case for why their discovery should be considered by other palaeontologists to represent a new genus of dinosaur; indeed, most of the paper will often be devoted to arguing this case. They will need to justify the distinctness of their specimen, pointing out the features it has that are too different from closely related known animals to ‘lump’ it within one of these.

This is not always as easy to do as it might sound. What exactly is a genus, and how does it differ from a species? As an example, the modern genus of big cats called Panthera includes lions (P. leo), tigers (P. tigris), and leopards (P. pardus), which are all different species. Lions, tigers and leopards (oh my) are pretty similar in a lot of ways: They are built large and strong, with powerful heads and necks and the ability to roar. But they also have a lot of differences. Lions have manes, don’t have spots or stripes, and have a very unusual suite of social behaviour that is not shared by other big cats. A different genus, then, must be even more different than this; the genus Neofelis, for example, is a ‘sister clade’ to Panthera, and includes two species of clouded leopard. Clouded leopards are distinct from all members of Panthera by their more elongate skulls, smaller body sizes, and other minute anatomical features.

In general, a palaeontologist will need to justify that a specimen is a new genus of dinosaur by showing that the fossil has features that are at least as different from all other genera as the clouded leopard is from lions, tigers and regular leopards. In some cases, a new specimen will be so similar to an existing genus of dinosaur that the authors will be unable to satisfactorily convince the reviewers or the journal’s editor that it really does represent a new genus. Other times they will succeed at publishing the description as a new genus, but other discoveries in the future might eventually reveal that this classification was done in error, and that the new specimen was actually more likely to represent a new species of an existing genus, or even a juvenile specimen of a known genus and species.

Unfortunately, the publication process does not always work in an unbiased fashion. Because it is much more interesting to the general public, the media and other palaeontologists when a new genus is discovered, a description of a new specimen might be published only with great difficulty if it only represents a new species or a new growth stage of an existing species. Sometimes, descriptions of new specimens might not be published at all, wasting away in a specimen drawer of a museum for decades. Other times, a specimen that was thought to belong to an existing species may later be assigned its own genus once a more complete specimen, showing previously unknown features, is discovered.

A lot of the time, however, a newly discovered dinosaur specimen will be unequivocally a new genus. For example, the genus of dromaeosaur called Dakotaraptor