Burgers and Hot Dogs

Sydney Mohr is a friend and colleague of mine whose art you will have seen in the news lately, if you are inclined to read about ankylosaurs. She's done amazing reconstructions of two ankylosaurs for me in the last year - Ziapelta and Gobisaurus - and so I asked her to take a few minutes and tell us about her process for creating her palaeoart. Also this way I get to show off more of her drawings, so yay!

Sydney decided that this Gobisaurus was named Burger, and that seemed fine with me.

Once we got started on Gobisaurus, I sent Sydney a pile of photos of both Gobisaurus and its close relative Shamosaurus, and some of my own very rough sketches of what the osteoderms might have looked like. Gobisaurus isn't completely known, so we're guessing a bit on the osteoderm arrangement in the final version and using Shamosaurus for the cervical armour. Here are the earliest sketches Sydney sent me - so many great poses and personality. Also, here's a Sydney in her natural habitat (thanks John Acorn for the photo!).

  

One of the things I really like about your art is that it's obvious you are very familiar with animal anatomy and behaviour – your dinosaurs have real animal personalities. Can you tell us about some of your inspirations for your palaeoart? 

The best inspiration any artist can have when reconstructing extinct animals are...living animals! In most cases that's the best if not the only source of reference we have, at least when it comes to external appearances. Depending on what type of fossil I'm drawing, I'll try to find an extant analogue/s that may share some characteristics, like habitat and environment, diet, colour scheme, etc. For colour in particular I often mix and modify schemes from two or more animals, all the while keeping the fossil's apparent paleobiology and habitat in mind. I'll peruse images of modern animals on the web to get an idea of the posture and stance I want the fossil animal to be in, as well as the lighting and angle. A lot of a creature's emotion comes from the face, so I really like to focus on eyes. Getting the shape, depth, colour, and light just so can make a huge difference in terms of giving a drawing personality. It also isn't a bad idea to look at other artist's work, obviously not to copy directly, but you might get ideas for new methods or techniques that you can adopt and fit into your own style. 

Mr Iridescent - a beautiful take on Microraptor. So shiny and chrome.

This reminds me, I think you said the Ziapelta reconstruction you did for our paper was inspired by a photo of a bird that you took! And that in turn reminds me that you are also a pretty great bird photographer - do you find that you get a better sense for conveying personality and movement in your dinosaurs by observing birds in the wild yourself?

So I did! The proudest grackle ever! 

I can see the family resemblence! Also, when I found out the Gobisaurus was named Burger, I asked if the Ziapelta had a name. Naturally, it was Hot Dog.

And definitely, seeing any animal in their habitat first hand can create a narrative in your mind that you can translate to paper. Birds are great to watch because a lot of the time they're always on the move and engaging in a variety of behaviours that are both interesting and fun to watch, as well as perfect fodder for a dinosaur reconstruction.  

You are also working on a Masters with Phil Currie at the University of Alberta! Would you like to tell us about what you're working on?

The thought of Mesozoic birds with bonafide teeth has really interested me for a while, so the plan is to explore the evolution of tooth loss in birds by comparing the implantation and replacement rates of small theropod (like dromaeosaurids and troodontids) and bird teeth. Looking into the anatomy of the jaw and the inner structures of the teeth of these closely related groups will hopefully yield some informative results. It's not easy because the stuff I need is comparatively rare and pretty darn tiny! I'm working entirely with Alberta material at the moment, and doing so has led me in other directions in terms of understanding the province's Cretaceous avian fauna, which is most represented in terms of numbers by, you guessed it, teeth!

Pygostylia Panoply: at the bottom, the toothy Early Cretaceous enantiornthine Rapaxavis, and up top, the duck-like (and toothless) Presbyornis.

Do you have a favourite taxon to illustrate?

Birds and feathered theropods are definitely up there.The more I do ankylosaurs though the more I enjoy drawing them. [YES FOLKS, YOU HEARD IT HERE: ANKYLOSAURS > THEROPODS.] They're so unique compared to anything else around today! I also enjoy doing mammals as well, like ungulates and carnivores (fossil or modern) and primitive examples from the Mesozoic. 

I am but a young'un: a perfectly floofular dromaeosaur chick. 

What medium/media do you like to work in?

I stick almost exclusively to traditional media; mainly pencil work, both black and white and colour, although I occasionally work in acrylic or watercolour. I prefer to work with fine tooth paper so I can vary my pencil strokes, blend more easily, and just have an overall smoother surface to work on. Coloured paper is also really fun to work with, like blue or black, because it makes drawing ocean scenes with pencil pretty simple. I've also dabbled in digital art via photoshop, but most of the time I only use it to fix mistakes and touch up scanned pencil drawings. In my case I find I have much more control with pencil and paper, and the results seem to be a bit more realistic, at least to my eyes. 

Ichthyornis dispar: a classic fossil bird, brought to life!

Do you have any advice for other people who are interested in creating their own palaeoart? Any common pitfalls to avoid, or things to think about when they are recreating an extinct animal?

I think one of the most important aspects of reconstruction is attention to detail, such as the dot of light and reflections in an eye, or the wind disturbing and ruffling fur or feathers, or the bulge of a muscle as a limb is flexed, or the crumpling of skin as it moves in a certain direction or shifts under the weight of the animal. Light, movement, and substance. Those kinds of little and almost unnoticeable features can take a simple reconstruction of a fossil to something that feels tangible and alive. In terms of pitfalls to avoid, I would say there isn't too much to worry about if you're just playing around and having fun, because hey, it's just art! That being said, if you're going for a publishable, as-accurate-as-possible, realistic style of depiction, then it's a good idea to become familiar with your subject, especially anatomy. If you can read up and get as close as possible to the original source material, like scientific papers, then you're that much closer to getting your skeletal anatomy down pat. Knowing some anatomy of modern animals is extremely helpful as well, as it informs how muscle and skin attaches to the bone and changes the outline of the body.

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Thanks Sydney! You can check out more of Sydney's amazing art and photography at her website, DeviantArt gallery, and Flickr gallery.

Snapshots from the Field Museum

Last week I got a chance to visit the Field Museum in Chicago for the first time! It's a great big museum with lots of cool stuff, so I figured I'd share a few impressions from my lunchtime jaunts through the exhibits. Let's get started with all the fossil exhibits outside of the main fossil hall (there are several, but some of them are kind of hidden away!).

SUE

Sue the Tyrannosaurus is most definitely not hidden away, and occupies a place of pride in the museum's main entrance hall. Sue is undeniably a great fossil, although I (and I suspect probably some other palaeontologists as well) have mixed feelings about this fossil: it's incredibly well preserved, but the intense backstory to Sue's acquisition is filled with several unpleasant twists and turns. I'm glad Sue found a home in a museum, but I wish it hadn't been placed up for auction - Sue's auctioning may not have directly led to the trend of putting dinosaurs up for auction for millions of dollars, but I feel like it set a bad precedent all the same.

One thing that's particularly enjoyable about this specific Tyrannosaurus skeleton are the abundant pathologies to be found. Sue has a busted/infected shin, holes in its jaw, and rough bumpy spots on its vertebrae. These vertebrae near the end of the tail have a big mass of crinkly bone around them. It's obvious Sue got up to some trouble during its life, and it's interesting to speculate on the causes of the various oddities in the skeleton (and indeed, others have!).

 Extinct Madagascar

Sadly, this exhibit is tucked so far out of the way that basically nobody had wandered back there besides me (you need to go through the conservation gallery to reach it). It's also a little bit specimen-sparse, a trend I've noticed recently in many museums and which I find somewhat concerning. However, I feel like it makes up for the lack of 3D objects in its cool and unusual subject matter - the extinct fauna of Madagascar. The main point to the gallery was showcasing the social media response to new images of Madagascar's prehistory, and the scientific process that went into those images. It was an interesting way to approach the topic, but might have been more compelling with video, audio, or more fossils.

It was pretty cool to see an Aepyornis (elephant bird) egg and life-size silhouette. They really were terrifyingly large and strange birds.

A highlight for me was this Palaeopropithecus skeleton - a lemur that lived and looked like a sloth.

Tracking the Reptiles of Pangea

Tucked away in the African mammals area was a room devoted to palaeontological fieldwork in Tanzania, featuring the newly described silesaurid Asilisaurus! This isn't a skeleton you're going to see in most museums - I only wish more people had been stepping into this little exhibit room to check it out.

A nice touch was showing the original fossil material in its cabinet-ready storage foam. Those are some nice fossils.

And one last fossil....

Seriously, how were these machines not in constant use? They're in the hallway leading towards the bottom-floor cafeteria, and you can get yourself a freshly-made retro Triceratops, Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, or Stegosaurus. I made a Brontosaurus and consider it $2 extremely well spent, especially since it meant I got rid of a bunch of dimes and nickels I didn't know what to do with:

Next time: Evolving Planet!

Meeting the Urvogel

Greetings from Deutschland! I've returned from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in Berlin. Here's a couple of snapshots from the Museum fur Naturkunde, where the welcome reception was held last week. Giraffatitan (nee Brachiosaurus) brancai supervised the shenanigans in the main entrance hall.

The dinosaur gallery is dominated by animals from the Tendaguru Formation in Tanzania, which was pretty neat. Most of us in North America are pretty familiar with the animals from the Morrison Formation, so it was neat to see some of their African doppelgangers, like Dysalotosaurus (American counterpart: Dryosaurus).

Elaphrosaurus, a ceratosaurian, was a new theropod for me.

And here's Kentrosaurus (American counterpart: Stegosaurus), with some excellent parascapular osteoderms. 

SVP is probably the only place where Archaeopteryx would have a lineup akin to someone meeting a rock star, but it IS a rock star in the palaeontological world.

It was pretty special to be able to see this famous fossil in the fossilized flesh. Archaeopteryx is sometimes called the Urvogel, or 'original bird' in German, and even though many new discoveries show that Archaeopteryx is not the only feathered dinosaur out there, it will always have an important place in the history of evolutionary study. 

Elsewhere in the museum, there were many fun treasures to be found, like this hippo skeleton.

The wet collections were spectacular and overwhelming.

Hey look, a Wall of Stuff! I love Walls of Stuff!

Walls of Stuff often reward close inspection. I learned about a new kind of large amphibian, the amphiuma! (The amphiuma's the one with the highly reduced legs; I've now forgotten what the other big salamander was!)

I was excited to see a quagga in the biodiversity gallery!

And a thylacine!!

This comparison of aquatically-adapted skeletons was a great way to show homologies and convergences in skeletons. One half of the body was a fleshed-out model, and the other was a skeleton (all were scaled to about the same length). In this photo you can see a sea turtle, seal or sea lion, dolphin, fish, and ichthyosaur, and there was also a penguin, hesperornithid, and plesiosaur in the case as well. 

That's all for Berlin for now, and I'm hoping to share some more information about Mongolian ankylsoaurs and some other exciting news in the next week or so! Until next time!

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Fine Feathered Friends

 

The Royal Alberta Museum is also currently hosting a temporary exhibit on the use of feathers in hat-making (millinery!) and fashion, called Fashioning Feathers. I'm not usually all that into the history of costume and fashion in museums, and so I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting I found this particular exhibit. I think it was the intersection of biology and fashion that was so neat.

 

 

 

There was a wide variety of taxidermied bird specimens showing what species were used for different styles, like in the photo above.

 

 

Besides the usual pheasants and roosters, there were some really unusual birds on display, like this Western Crowned Pigeon (Goura cristata).

 

 

 

 

 

I was pretty shocked to learn that many brilliantly coloured tropical birds, like birds of paradise, were dyed black for use in hats.  These three parrots are actually dyed Carolina parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis), which, through a combination of hunting, habitat loss, and the plume trade, went extinct in 1918.

 

Audubon's Carolina parakeets, via Wikipedia.

 

Why not use naturally black or dark-coloured birds? Whatever would possess someone to harvest such colourful birds only to dye them black, when there are SO MANY shiny black birds present in North America? The mind boggles.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Take the Left Turn at Albuquerque

I visited the New Mexico Museum of Natural History in June for a couple of days with my friend and colleague Mike Burns to look at [top secret specimen yet again, sorry!]. OH MAN was Albuquerque toasty in June. But we had a very fine time indeed eating southwest food and visiting the museum.

 

 

 

In part I liked the museum because it has such a large collection of Triassic vertebrates, which I don't really see too much of in my travels to look at Late Cretaceous dinosaurs. I hadn't really realized just how BIG Placerias was.

 

 

 

There was a wonderful big block of Ghost Ranch Coelophysis, which you could definitely spend a good amount of time poring over.

 

 

 

And I also enjoyed the various walls-o-Triassic-skulls, like these phytosaurs.

 

 

 

I know Stegosaurus is a staple of many dinosaur halls, but the subdued yet modern pose of this particular mount is really pleasing. Note also that the manus is correctly mounted!

 

 

 

The Jurassic gallery is dominated by this Seismosaurus and Saurophaganax pair, as well as a deliciously weird but detailed mural. Many of the original bones used to create these mounts are laid out on the bases of the mounts, and there are helpful skeletal diagrams to show what original material is known.

 

 

A temporary exhibit celebrating 100 years of discovery in New Mexico reveals a new exhibit case each month. One month featured a relatively recently named tyrannosaur called Bistahieversor.

 

 

The Cretaceous hall was pretty neat, with lots of living trees and other plants and a mural of the seaside enveloping the room. Two life reconstructions of marine vertebrates of the Cretaceous, a mosasaur and the swimming bird Hesperornis, were particularly cool. I really liked the grebe feet on the Hesperornis! I'm not sure if there's any evidence for it, and now I want to find out!

 

Care of Magical Creatures

The University of Alberta is currently hosting an exhibit called Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine, in the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. Let's Talk Science, a Canadian science outreach organization with a U of A chapter, was asked to organize 'classes' for a Harry Potter-themed science day, so my good friend Scott Persons and I put together "Care of Magical Creatures". You may think it would be hard to mix magic and mythology with science, but we were pretty happy with how much natural history education we were able to convey over the course of the day. For those interested in science outreach and education, here's how to do your own Care of Magical Creatures class. You might be surprised by the results!

First of all, I cannot thank enough the other BioSci grad students who volunteered to help us out during the day. We handled around 1400 people in 5 hours and it was BUSY. Everyone did a great job and we all had a lot of fun even if we mostly lost our voices by the end of the day. You might notice that the room we occupied was pretty small - in some ways this was good because it allowed for a controlled (sort of) number of people at any given time, but we also ran out of air pretty quickly. There were numerous other 'classes' held in small rooms like this - an Owlery featuring a burrowing owl from the local wildlife rescue, Ollivander's wand shop, Muggle Studies (DNA extraction), Potions (chemistry), Herbology (botany), and many more I can't remember right now.

For Care of Magical Creatures, Scott and I chose a variety of extant and extinct specimens from our zoology and palaeontology collections, using animals that either inspired mythological creatures or that resembled them in some way. We are very lucky to have access to a lot of good specimens, but if you work in a museum or university you might have access to a lot of similar items for your own workshop. We also tried to feature a lot of the animals from Harry Potter, although we didn't get everything and we had some animals that weren't mentioned in the books. Above is a golden pheasant taxidermy specimen; the golden pheasant is one of the possible inspirations for the phoenix.

 

Elephant skulls probably inspired the legend of the cyclops. At this station we also had a Protoceratops skull, which may been the inspiration for the griffin.

 

Scott makes a unicorn! The narwhal tusk was a big draw, and also allowed us to talk about conservation and how we acquire zoological specimens.

 

The manatee skull was also a big surprise to many people - you're looking at the face of a mermaid. We also had a mosasaur skull and real mosasaur jaw at our 'aquatic animals' station. Scott had the great idea to print out some double-sided cards with the mythological creature on one side and the real animal on the other - we would flip over to the real animal after the kids tried to guess what it was. Very helpful when you only have a skull of an unfamiliar animal!

 

For our dragon station, we used animals that had dragon-like qualities, since no one animal is the direct inspiration for the dragon, and because many cultures have their own dragon mythology. We used a cast of the ankylosaur Minotaurasaurus (which looks like the Hungarian Horntail), a komodo dragon skull (a real life dragon!), and our wonderful taxidermied ground pangolin. Not a single person who visited our table had ever seen or heard of a pangolin, so it was a really great opportunity to show off this unusual mammal.

 

We also had a werewolf station with our very weird coyote with a degenerative spinal disease, a grey wolf skull, and a dire wolf skull.

 

Finally, the platypus was used as an example of a chimaera-like animal.

In order to make the activity a bit more hands-on and interactive, we also gave the children a 'specimen card' I had made up. They needed to find all four items, and at the end we had a table with glue bottles for sticking the specimens on. We purchased enough supplies for 1000 people, and in total it cost about $180 CAD to buy:

12 bags of red and yellow craft feathers (phoenix feathers)

2 packs of 500 mixed googly eyes (cyclops eyes)

one paw print stamp and two stamp pads (werewolf print)

3 bags of crushed colourful shells (dragon scales)

6 bottles of sticky craft glue

(Edit: I forgot to mention that this also covered printing 1000 copies of the explorer's card, with two per page, on heavy cardstock.)

 

Our "Care of Magical Creatures" workshop allowed us to talk about not only the real-life inspiration for mythological and magical creatures, but also animal anatomy and functional anatomy, ecology, evolution, and conservation. I'd love to use this workshop again sometime even without the whole set of classes that were available at the event.

Have you ever tried a Harry Potter-related science workshop? Tell me about it in the comments!