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Welcome to Jurassic Art

I grew up with Michael Crichton's story: John Hammond's signature "spared no expense" quote, Dr. Alan Grant's claw, Dr. Ellie Sattler's dino dropping search, their two faces beautifully gawking at the Brachiosauruses, and Dr. Ian Malcom saying "life, uh, finds a way". Significantly, people in my parent's, mine, and the latest generation of today wouldn't know about or, most likely, be nearly as interested in dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals without the decades of dedication from scientists and paleoartists.


As it sounds, the word "paleoart" is a portmanteau of paleo-, meaning ancient (from 'paleontology' - the study of ancient life), and art. This word was notably coined by Mark Hallett in the 1980's and showed up in his published work "The scientific approach of the art of bringing dinosaurs back to life" from Dinosaurs Past and Present (vol 1) in 1987.


Based on fossils found by Mary Anning, and was the first pictorial representation of a scene from deep time, based on fossil evidence.


As discussed in The Palaeoartist's Handbook by Witton and Paleoart: Visions of the prehistoric past by Lescaze, the practice of paleoart as a "visual tradition" originated in 1800s England (Lescaze, 2017; Witton, 2018). However, what is extremely interesting to look at are the pieces of 'proto-paleoart' which can be dated back to 500 BCE, even though the scientifically based fossil work in this early period is less concrete. This practice later reached a wonderful number of people in the Middle Ages/Medieval Period because of the volumes of compendiums on the subject of incredible and mythical animals, the bestiarum vocabulum or bestiaries.


The only way we have a world in which Jurassic Park exists is because of palaeontologists, paleoartists, the authors and artists of bestiaries, and hundreds of years of scientific study into the fascinating world of fossils and biology inspired by the crazy creatures found in bestiaries.


Fossil hunting of Today


We seem to be having a new fossil gold age today, finding new species and making new connections to what prehistoric animals looked like and how they may have lived.


With the hard work of scientists around the world we now have evidence of a giant swimming Spinosaurus, feathered theropod dinosaurs, the skin of non-feathered dinos, a baby dino preserved with soft tissue in amber, and even how pre-dinosaur animals' blood worked. A lot of these articles are very new and some present ideas that are being argued over, but that's good. A healthy discourse and exchanging of ideas introduces more in depth knowledge and thus, changing ideas of the earth's past and how we got where we are now.


Before we got where we are now, we had an era that is regarded as a paleontology renaissance (70-90s) when humans finally appreciated that dinosaurs were living, alert, warm-blooded animals that evolved into birds, instead of slow, lumbering, Hollywood-style monsters that just died out due to laziness. Some of the species of animals that were found during this time were the dinosaurs Dilophosaurus, the theropod dinosaur that spit acid in the movies and the Deinonychus (though technically first described in the 1960s), which the Velociraptors in the Jurassic Park movie and book were based on. While we have moved past these ideas and visualizations now, worldwide work in: continent wide Africa, China, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Americas, etc. shaped how we look at proto-Triassic animals, dinosaurs and their contemporaries, all animals otherwise, phylogenetic trees, and evolution itself. Moving our planetary understanding of the past forwards into connecting with the living creatures that evolved from them.


While found around a century before the Dinosaur Renaissance, the well known Archaeopteryx fossil skeleton was found in Southern Germany, an area that was once an archipelago of islands in a shallow tropical sea in the Late Jurassic Period. While agreed that this is a transitional fossil, what should be more appreciated is the feathers alone, and how well the stone was preserved initially and protected by the scientists through time. Many times in history finds such as this were never shown, or even worse, destroyed, because they were controversial. We were, therefore, very lucky with this find.

Left: Vogt, C. 1880. "Archaeopteryx macrura, an Intermediate Form between Birds and Reptiles".

Right: updated version by H. Raab

This links to the knowledge of old creatures. Dragons, unicorns, krakens, leviathans, chimera, etc. were in the world; dangerous and/or magnanimous beings created by the gods or God to, apparently, keep the old world interesting, as they were believed to be completely real.



Biological connections

What is evident in much of the new research is how much it is obvious that these creatures from the prehistoric world are connected to living animals. According to Witton, there are recommended scientific guidelines that must be followed to be able to classify a piece of art in this genre (Witton, 2018: 38). These necessary requirements include the creatures geochronology (its place in time), paleobiogeography (location in the ancient past), a skeletal/body shape reference, and, if possible, an understanding of the organisms' ontogeny, functional morphology, and phylogeny (Witton, 2018: 37-43).


I would never argue that geese or swans aren't vicious, basically they seem to be connecting with their distant ancestors and their current relatives in Australia, like the cassowary. As an example of how this species can act, the female half of the mating pair that the Featherdale Wildlife Park had in captivity in 2010 (when I was visiting) was so violent towards the male that they had to keep them separate while not in heat, otherwise the larger female cassowary would attack the male to keep him out of her territory. This isn't only a practice found in birds either; female jaguars in Meso- and South America keep watch over around 9 to 15 sq miles with male territory areas overlapping with various territories of local females (Schaller, 1980).

These aren't monsters or skeletons or rocks, they were living animals, as show in the Paleoart below.

'Leaping Laelaps' by Charles R. Knight, 1896

  1. Reconstruction in a quadrupedal gait of the skeleton of the Upper Cretaceous of Kundur (Russia) hadrosaurid dinosaur Olorotitan arharensis by Andrey Atuchin (Godefroit, Bolotsky, and Alifanov, 2003).

  2. Pair of azhdarchid pterosaurs: Arambourgiania the Late Cretaceous Maastrichtian species Arambourgiania philadelphiae (Mark Witton, 2017).

  3. Cast of Tyrannosaurus rex specimen AMNH 5027 mounted in a "leaping posture" by Robert Bakker at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (photo by Scott Robert Anselmo, 2016).


These are opposed to the more reptilian versions that came before taxonomy models were updated.

  1. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's 1850s sculptures of an Iguanodon pair, some of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (Mantell, 1851).

  2. Jean Hermann's 1800 restoration of the pterosaur Pterodactylus antiquus (Taquet, and Padian, 2004).

  3. Illustration ofIguanodon and Megalosaurus engaged in combat, fromLa Terre Avant le Deluge (Édouard Riou's, 1865)


These art pieces and scientific discoveries were not only of dinosaurs and I'm sorry for mostly focussing on them up until now, so following are example of other paleoart.

Top left to bottom left and top right to bottom right

  1. Liam Elward Paleoart @paleobyliam

  2. Reconstruction of a mammoth, based on frozen carcass observed in Siberia by Roman Boltunov (1805)

  3. Several sharks from the Carboniferous Period.(Julius Csotonyi, Smithsonian Institution)

  4. Nebraska Savannah, Late Oligocene to Early Miocene (24.8 to 20.6 million years ago) by Jay Matternes, 1961 (NMNH) (Smithsonian mag, 2019)

  5. Entelodon (then known as Elotherium), the first commissioned restoration of an extinct animal by Charles R. Knight (1890's)

  6. Smilodon populator by Charles R. Knight (1903) from American Museum of Natural History.

  7. These snails roamed the seafloor in this Carboniferous Period scene.(Smithsonian Institution)


This is important to remember because paleoart and fossil work has been recorded through paintings, carvings, and sculptures back to Ancient Greece, although even calling it "proto-paleoart" is a stretch because it likely wasn't a purposeful scientific study, where a Corinthian vase, painted sometime between 560 and 540 BCE, is thought to be a depiction of an observed fossil skull (Mayor, 2011). It was know as "the monster of Troy" who was fought by Heracles, and it's head apparently resembles a skull of an extinct species of giraffid, the Samotherium; who's name translates to "beast of Samos" [which makes an automatic connection, whether intended or not] (Ellis, 2004: 6).



The much more commonly passed around fossil to mythological connection would have to be the Cyclopes, with the big hole in the middle actually being the nostril rather than the eye. Though as Witton also points out, these ideas have never been substantiated in the academic community, with them just making appearance in general popular culture [though that doesn't meanie can rule it out completely] (Witton, 2018: 18). Even if the ancient historical writings or drawings were completely incorrect in what the original fossils showed, the work and some scientific thought was put into the depictions and the stories that were shared with the populous.



Bestiaries


Finally arriving at the main thesis of the article, the Medieval practice of writing and illustrating bestiaries. Even these manuscript collections were not the first examples of drawing creatures that we humans did not understand. It does, however, appear to be one of the earliest examples of paleoart using both zoology and archaeozoology, the science of how animals interacted with humans, how they played a role in our culture, based on the biology of creatures of the past or living in that particular present.


If someone has played Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, or maybe spent time looking through the Monster Manual, that someone has encountered a bestiary (even if they didn't read it through). Within that collection, Games Masters and players alike are given descriptions of some of the backstories of the creatures within along with where they are found, how they typically act, a list of attacks, strengths and weakness, and their stats next to an illustration. That means that someone in that universe either comprised an amazing collection of descriptions by adventures who encountered them, or a scholar went out to their habitat and based made a written documentary. Both have been done in our universe/plane of existence, so neither is THAT strange. But as stated in the previous section, Witton's list of recommendations is followed extremely closely. If it wasn't based on animals in fictional world, it could count as (sort-of) paleoart, especially since, while most creatures are still alive, at least until lvl 20 adventures fight them, many do harken back to the ancient past.


*If one wants to read the original 5e Monster Manual you can either buy a physical copy, buy it on DnDbeyond, or find pdf version (they are everywhere).


Example of Pages from and the Monsters within the D&D Monster Manual (images below to their respective owners)


Moving towards the reality of medieval bestiaries, these illustrated compendiums included animals, plants, and even rocks (not fossils) and seemed to have inspired the backstory aspect of our current bestiaries by including a moral, mostly relating to Christianity and God in some way. But, while more commonly associated with the medieval monks in Europe there has been at least one found from China. It is not clear who the original author was, but it has been attributed to the ancient emperor Yu the Great, first emperor of the Xia dynasty (Strassberg, 2002: 4). Several academics agree that it was more of a living document, with updates being made over the centuries due to the inclusion of 'history' of Xia dynasty that hadn't happened when it was thought to be originally written in the 4th century BCE (Lust, 1996; Bagrow & Skelton, 2009; Jao, 2014). It was named Guideways Through Mountains and Seas [山海經 "Shan Hai Jing"] or Classic of Mountains and Seas which described and/or illustrated: stories from explorers, wizards, and alchemists, many Chinese myths and "more than 100 states, 550 mountains, 300 waterways, and the geography, terroir and natural products of the states. According to the statistics of the animals in the "Shan Hai Jing", there are as many as 277 species" within its "18 volumes, including 5 volumes of "Shan Jing", 8 volumes of "Hai Jing", 4 volumes of "Da Huang Jing", and 1 volume of "Hai Jing Jing",... [and] a total of about 31,000 words" (Lewis, 2006; 2009).



Classic of Mountains and Seas illustrations [left to right]:

- Nine-headed phoenix (colored Qing dynasty edition)

- Nine-tailed Fox, companion of the Queen Mother of the West

- Illustration of Nüwa

- Man riding and dragon [not the name] (1597 edition), plate LXI

- the last one I can't find info for, and the only bolded character I recognize is 天 'tian' = day


The first bestiary that historians have studied is from the European tradition is from Ancient Greece, with its popularity dating back to the 2nd century Christian Greek volume called the Physiologus (Clark, 2005). Like in the Chinese Classic, the Physiologus was compilation of descriptions of animals, plants, and sometimes and land itself, allegorical stories and tales of morality (Scarborough & Kazhdan, 1991). This compendium was not as objective or directly nature based as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, with the first 10 books published by AD 77 with the rest of the 37 published after his death by his son, Pliny the Younger, or Aristotle's De animalium in which he sets up the Scala naturae. As Curely states "[the] Physiologus was never intended to be a treatise on natural history. ... Nor did the word ... ever mean simply "the naturalist" as we understand the term, ... but one who interpreted metaphysically, morally, and, finally, mystically the trancendent signficance of the natural world" (Curely, 1979: xv).


  1. Detail from the 12th century Aberdeen Bestiary

  2. Monoceros and Bear. Bodleian Library, MS. Ashmole 1511, The Ashmole Bestiary, Folio 21r, England, (early 13th century)

  3. "The Leopard" from the 13th-century bestiary known as the "Rochester Bestiary"

  4. The Peridexion Tree (The Oxford Bestiary c. 1220)


Another similarity is that the original author is unknown, but it was probably collected in Alexandria due to its similarities with the works of Titus Flavius Clemens, aka Clement of Alexandria who lived in the 1st and early 2nd centuries (Scott, 1998: 430-441). Over the centuries the original text has been translated multiple times into many different languages, with more illustrations being added. The following images are examples of pages from the earliest versions that still exist. This translation is called the Bern Physiologus, a "9th-century illuminated copy of the Latin translation of the Physiologus and was probably produced at Reims about 825-850" (Calkins, 1983).


1. Panther, Bern Physiologus, 9th century

2. Folio 12v of the Bern Physiologus.


The Klagenfurt Lindworm sculpture in Klagenfurt, Austria by Ulrich Vogelsang from around 1590.

The bestiaries are connection to the early works of fossils. The idea of the Lindworm was possibly conceived in writings of the time that were partially based on a skull found in a mine or gravel pit near Klagenfurt in 1335 of Coelodonta antiquitatis, the woolly rhinoceros, as the basis for the head, which remains on display today (Witton, 2018: 18). The German textbook Mundus Subterraneus, by Athanasius Kircher in 1678, features a number of illustrations of giant humans and dragons that may have been informed by fossil finds of the day, many of which came from explored quarries and caves. Some may have been the bones of large Pleistocene mammals common to these European caves, while others may have been based on far older fossils of plesiosaurs. Like the mammoth-cyclopes, however, it's difficult to know for sure where ideas arose from. According to some researchers, the change from the typical dragon artwork of this time, which were shown to have the classically slender, serpentine dragon shape, in lieu of a barrel-like body and 'paddle-like' wings has been thought to have been the arrival of a new source of information, such as the speculated discovery of plesiosaur fossils in quarries of the Swabia region of Bavaria (Abel, 1939; Witton, 2018: 19-21).


The 18th century skeletal reconstructions of the unicorn are thought to have been inspired by Ice Age mammoth and rhinoceros bones found in a cave near Quedlinburg, Germany in 1663. These artworks are of uncertain origin and may have been created by Otto von Guericke, the German naturalist who first described the "unicorn" remains in his writings, or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the author who published the image posthumously in 1749, which is the oldest known illustration of a fossil skeleton (Witton, 2018: 20–21; Ariew, 1998).



Conclusion


Science moves forward, ideas change, that's the wonderful thing about intellectual progress. We look back at the ancient and mediaeval bestiaries, at the papers, illustrations, and sculptures up through the 19th and 20th centuries, and up to today and see that we make mistakes; we don't see the whole picture. But, we continue to try, to improve, to learn more.


Life finds a way, and authors and artists have long sought to share the experience. From pre-ancient Greece to today the natural bestiary was the birth of scientifically minded paleoart. The reflexive topic demonstrates how today's society has continued to look at unknown creatures in our world and their place in scientific progress. At first these animals were made from magic or myths of monsters or demons, but, with time, advances in study, and open-mindedness the work shows that it's the natural laws that govern us all.


 

*Paleontology is not connected to archaeology at all. Archaeologists are not designated studiers of dinosaurs. Paleontology is a subset of either biology or geology (depending on the university) and archaeology is a subset under anthropology - a study of human culture. Archaeology (the study of ancient human culture) is also under the BA system rather than BS, but it varies depending on the university. I just love to study ancient life, in all its forms*


Additional Information:


Like the other topics I've started to jump into, there's so much more that could be a whole book, or more. I hope that I have just left someone with the idea to type paleoart or bestiaries into google scholar for themselves.


And read these two articles:


My biggest recommendations go to PBS Eons and YDAW (Your Dinosaurs are Wrong). They are both educational and entertaining. While I love rewatching Jurassic Park it doesn't inspire me as much as these YouTube channels do at this point in my life. Yes, reading scientific journals, as the direct sources, is useful for the information, but some light viewing shouldn't be sneered at. Just follow the citations the YouTubers source, to get more background.


Specifically, for more about Paleoart and its evolution I'd watch An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs. This was what this article was going to be before I watched it on Tuesday, and thus, reworked the topic.


Futher Reading:






Work Cited:

  • Abel, Othenio (1939). Vorzeitliche Tierreste im Deutschen Mthus, Brachtum und Volksglauben. Jena (Gustav Fischer).


  • Arbour, Victoria. (2018). "Results roll in from the dinosaur renaissance." Science: 611-611.


  • Ariew, R (1998). "Leibniz on the unicorn and various other curiosities". Early Science and Medicine (3): 39–50.




  • Campione, Nicolás E., Paul M. Barrett, and David C. Evans. (2020). "On the Ancestry of Feathers in Mesozoic Dinosaurs."The Evolution of Feathers. Springer, Cham: 213-243.


  • Clark, Willene B.; McMunn, Meradith T. (2005). "Introduction". In Clark, Willene B.; McMunn, Meradith T. (eds.). Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages. The Bestiary and Its Legacy. Nation Books: 2–4. ISBN0-8122-8147-0.


  • Curley, M. J. (1979). Physiologus. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN: 0-292-76456-1.



  • Fabbri, Matteo, et al. (2019). "Three‐dimensional soft tissue preservation revealed in the skin of a non‐avian dinosaur."Palaeontology.



  • Huttenlocker, Adam K., and C. G. Farmer. (2017). "Bone microvasculature tracks red blood cell size diminution in Triassic mammal and dinosaur forerunners." Current Biology 27.1: 48-54.


  • Ibrahim, Nizar, et al. (2020). "Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur."Nature: 1-4.


  • Jao (2014). Shen Hai Jing.


  • Koepfer, Diana L., and John Gurche. “Representation and Aesthetics in Paleo-Art: An Interview with John Gurche.”American Anthropologist, vol. 105, no. 1, 2003, pp. 146–148.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3567324.


  • Lescaze, Zoë (2017). Paleoart: Visions of the prehistoric past. Taschen. ISBN 978-3836555111.




  • Liston, J. J.( 2010). "2000 AD and the new ‘Flesh’: first to report the dinosaur renaissance in ‘moving’pictures."Geological Society, London, Special Publications. 343.1: 335-360.



  • Mantell, Gideon A. (1851). Petrifications and their teachings: or, a handbook to the gallery of organic remains of the British Museum. London: H. G. Bohn. OCLC 8415138.


  • Mayor, Adrienne (2011). The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (second edition). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15013-0.



  • Schaller, George B.; Crawshaw, Peter Gransden Jr. (1980). "Movement Patterns of Jaguar". Biotropica.12(3): 161–168. doi:10.2307/2387967. JSTOR2387967.


  • Scott, Alan. (1998). "The Date of the Physiologus"Vigiliae Christianae 52.4. November: 430-441.


  • Strassberg, Richard E., ed.A Chinese bestiary: strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas. Univ of California Press, 2002.


  • Taquet, P., and Padian, K. (2004). "The earliest known restoration of a pterosaur and the philosophical origins of Cuvier’s Ossemens Fossiles." Comptes Rendus Palevol, 3(2): 157-175.


  • Taylor, Michael P. (2006). "Dinosaur diversity analysed by clade, age, place and year of description." 9th [Ninth] Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems. Cambridge Pulications.





  • Xing, Lida, et al. ((2017). "A mid-Cretaceous enantiornithine (Aves) hatchling preserved in Burmese amber with unusual plumage." Gondwana Research 49: 264-277.

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