Dryptosaurus for the Digital Age

Paleontology is a field full of holes. There are gaps in the fossil record obscuring evolutionary transitions, and most of the taxa we know and love are not known from complete remains. Then, there's the lag between a taxon's discovery and comprehensive study of its fossils, which can take decades. Dryptosaurus, the New Jersey tyrannosauroid formerly known as Laelaps, is one of those obscure animals that languished for years, thankfully receiving more attention recently, employing today's more robust paleontological methods. Last year, a new assessment of Dryptosaurus was published by Steve Brusatte, Mark Norell, and Roger Benson. Tyler Keillor, an Illinois paleoartist, is setting out to build on the study substantially. With Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform, he's attempting to raise the money to create a high-quality, accurate reconstruction of Dryptosaurus.

He writes:

My Kickstarter plan is to create the most realistic, accurate, and up to date life-reconstruction of the predatory dinosaur Dryptosaurus. Surpassing the traditionally sculpted life-sized dinosaur busts I've become known for, this will be a full body digital sculpture. I will use the latest paleontological information as the foundation for my creation, and have my work reviewed for accuracy by paleontologist Steve Brusatte, lead author of the most current in-depth study of Dryptosaurus. My references will also include discussions with paleontologist and theropod expert Dr. Thomas Carr.

This is a potentially powerful way for paleoartists to make important contributions to public knowledge without having to rely on commissions or commercial projects, so it would be amazing if paleontology enthusiasts contributed en masse. Here's Keillor's video pitch, part of the requirement for launching a Kickstarter campaign.



Again, check out Keillor's Kickstarter campaign page. If you're unfamiliar with Kickstarter, keep in mind that your pledge will only be required if the project goal - in this case $6,000 US - is met. In the few days since the campaign began, Keillor has reached just over half of his goal. He has until October 7 to make the remaining $3,000. Thanks to Domain of the C-Rex for the tip off.

Jersey boy paints dinosaurs

As a New Jersey native who works with animals, studied at Rutgers and is a real dinosaur nut, it was only natural that Chris DiPiazza became involved in hunting dinosaurs in his home state with Gary Vecchiarelli, the founder of 'Project Dryptosaurus' - Dryptosaurus, of course, being a most important basal tyrannosauroid from said state. Their adventures (alongside fellow contributors Terry Alan Davis Jr. and Andrea Bilardi) are chronicled on the Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs blog, which also runs regular educational articles on various prehistoric animals.

Chris churns out artwork like nobody's business, and has been commissioned by various publishers and institutions, including Rutgers. What's more, he even delivers lectures (with the help of some of his animal pals) on dinosaurs and evolution to hordes of (what I'm sure are) adoring kiddiwinks. As such, he's a busy guy, but I managed to have him answer some of my questions on his art, field work and New Jersey. All artwork is copyright Chris DiPiazza and used with permission, ya hear?

Chris (right) with friend.

You're currently a writer for the Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs blog. Your biography on there claims that you've been "dinosaur obsessed with birth" - a remarkable achievement. Did the midwife confirm that you performed a convincing impression of a hatchling titanosaur shortly after emerging into the world?

What do you mean “impression”? Doesn’t everyone hatch from eggs? I don’t understand…

Your artwork has really been gaining some interest recently - as is noted on JBHD, you've managed to get commissioned by museums and publishers. What's the feedback been like from fellow palaeoartists and from palaeontologists? Has there been a lot of encouragement?

As far as I know, nobody particularly dislikes my work so that’s good! If they do they haven’t told me (ha ha).  I post a lot of my work on Facebook and sometimes paleontologists will comment on it or 'like' it (Dr. Thomas Holtz most notably when it comes to paleontologists). I have also recently met up with Larry Felder, co-author and illustrator of In the Presence of Dinosaurs, when he attended one of my lectures at the zoo and he had nothing but complementary things to say. Paleontologist/paleo-artist Bruce Mohn has been casually coaching me on my art since I met him at Rutgers as an undergrad as well. There have been other instances but those are the most notable I feel.

Pachyrhinosaurus

Your preferred media are definitely pencils and watercolours, and the latter certainly is quite an unusual choice among palaeo illustrators. What is it that draws you to watercolour painting?

I have been formally trained in a lot of mediums including oils, acrylics, inks and even sculpting to a degree but for some reason watercolors are the one that really stuck with me. I won’t lie to you, it’s a huge pain in the butt to work with since it requires patience - one false brush stroke and you could very well have an irreversible mistake on your painting! My grandmother (also an artist) would keep a hairdryer with her when painting with watercolors. Every time she applied something she liked she would immediately blast it with the hairdryer to preserve it and to make it dry more quickly! Once I got the hang of it though, I found it extremely rewarding.

Unlike a lot of other media, watercolors sort of force you to make almost every color you use on your painting. This made me a master at mixing colors and it also gave me an interesting new outlook on subjects that I am painting. Nothing in nature is ever one solid color. You may look at something like a leaf for instance and say that it’s green. But if you look at that same leaf more closely you may notice that in addition to green it has all sorts of other, more subtle, hues and shades to it as well. Same can apply for any animal, plant, and even a rock can possess quite a wide pallet.

Hadrosaurus and Dryptosaurus

Which palaeoartists have been your primary influences, and whom do you most admire?

Oh wow so many! I’d have to say that from my childhood I got a lot of inspiration from artists like Doug Henderson and Greg Paul. Henderson is really good at portraying different perspectives and lighting (important factors for a realism artist). Greg Paul on the other hand always inspired me with the way he would portray dinosaurs so actively. Over the years I have learned to appreciate a lot more artists. Some current favorites of mine are Raul Martin and Julius Csotonyi (who also uses watercolors I should add!). Of course I feel I must also mention that I am a big fan of Charles Knight (what paleo-nerd isn’t). I used to love (and still do) seeing his paintings up on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 

How have you enjoyed getting your hands dirty in the field with Gary Vecchiarelli, and do you think the experiences have fed back into your art?

I really must say I don’t go out digging up fossils half as frequently as Gary does but the times that I do go I absolutely enjoy myself. Getting dirty isn’t really a big deal to me (after over a decade of working with animals it’s almost impossible to gross me out with stuff like dirt…and blood…and poop…and other stuff). My favorite fossil hunting trip so far was going to the Passaic Formation in New Jersey to excavate Triassic dinosaur footprints.
 
Finding real fossils definitely inspires the artist in me but even more so is my job working with living animals. Let’s not forget that just because most dinosaurs went extinct doesn’t mean they stopped being considered animals! Creatures that I work with like crocodilians and various birds give me a little window into what their extinct relatives may have been like. In fact, if you know what to look for, you can easily pick out references to the animals I work with when it comes to coloration and behavior in a lot of my paleo-art.
 
What's your favourite dinosaur that isn't Triceratops?

Ha ha you know me too well! Well, other than the mighty Triceratops and the other ceratopsids, I really like Pachycephalosaurus. I had always thought it was neat in general, but what really got me inspired was when I saw Pachycephalosaurus in The Lost World: Jurassic Park at the theater when I was eight years old. Ever since that day it has been one of my top favorites. I think that film did a beautiful job portraying that animal in a much more modern light than ever before. Struthiomimus I also find pretty interesting, as well as Dryptosaurus and Hadrosaurus since they are from my home state, New Jersey.  As far as modern dinosaurs go, the osprey or Pandion haliaetus, is at the top of my list.

Styracosaurus

You're also an educator, delivering lectures on dinosaurs living and dead. How have audiences swallowed all your wackaloon 'birds are dinosaurs' evolution-talk? Ever encountered any dissenters?

I get a few here and there but they usually aren’t too serious. More just skeptics and by the time I’m done with my lecture (that showcases a LOT of hard evidence that birds are dinosaurs) they understand more what I mean. Believe it or not, the kids know this more than the adults. I suppose it’s because the 'birds are dinosaurs' thing is becoming more mainstream finally and is therefore broadcast on popular TV shows that the kids watch. 
I have never had any hard-core creationists bother me or anything like that. I totally respect people with religious beliefs and I expect the same respect from them as well. 

What's New Jersey like? I've never been there.

It’s a hell of a lot nicer than most people give it credit for. Believe it or not there is a lot more to the state than the Jersey Shore. We have great roller coasters AND awesome dinosaur museums. Let’s not forget NJ is the birthplace of American paleontology (at least when it comes to dinosaurs) too! I keep telling you to fly over and visit one day! [We met once when Chris visited London with his friends. We went to the Natural History Museum and the Tower, before I got slightly drunk and started telling them lies about Tower Bridge. A good time was had by all.

A baby Dryptosaurus harasses a horseshoe crab

I'd like to thank Chris again for taking the time to answer my questions, and remind all of you that he regularly posts new artwork over at Jersey Boys Hunt Dinosaurs. So keep an eye out!

Leaping Laelaps, Indeed

In Friday's Vintage Dinosaur Art post on Charles R. Knight, I couldn't resist including his famous painting of E.D. Cope's theropod Laelaps, (which his bitter rival O.C. Marsh would rename Dryptosaurus in 1877 when it was discovered that a mite had the name Laelaps first). This sparked a conversation in the comments about the general reputation of large theropods in the late 19th century. In the early 20th century, the "ladder of progress" idea of evolution came into vogue and the dinosaurs became exemplars of evolutionary failure: beasts too stupid and ponderous to survive the mammalian apocalypse.

But it wasn't always like that; I knew Knight's painting reflected the view of the theropod as a dynamic, active predator and I wanted to dig into some literature and find where this began. It's not a completely thorough review of every mention of Laelaps, but I think I've dipped into enough from the era to give a good impression of just how dynamic a predatory dinosaur was thought to be. One quick note: I'll use both Dryptosaurus and Laelaps in this post, the former when discussing the modern knowledge about it, the latter when referring to it in a historical context.

As noted in the previous post and its comments, Knight was not an artist who did his own research, as Gregory S. Paul does today. Knight followed the most contemporary knowledge of the paleontological community and his individual patrons, which in this case was Cope. Indeed, in an early account of his work in The American Naturalist, Cope himself would invoke a modern analog when discussing Laelaps when he wrote that the long legs of the dinosaur...

...joined with the massive tail points to a semi erect position like that of the Kangaroos while the lightness and strength of the great femur and tibia are altogether appropriate to great powers of leaping.

Hardwicke's Science-Gossip, a short-lived 19th century pop-sci magazine, echoed this in an 1891 story and added a bit of gory detail:

The Laelaps was forty feet long, stood twenty-five feet high on its hindlegs, and was built like a kangaroo. It was the most astonishing jumper that ever existed, with teeth for cutting and sharp claws on the front feet, evidently designed for tearing out its adversary's eyes.

Taking it even further, Sir John William Dawson wrote a colorful passage on Laelaps in his 1873 pop-sci book The Story of Earth and Man, culminating with this image:

Had we seen the eagle clawed Laelaps rushing on his prey; throwing his huge bulk perhaps thirty feet through the air, and crushing to the earth under his gigantic talons some feebler Hadrosaur, we should have shudderingly preferred the companionship of modern wolves and tigers to that of those savage and gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic.

Dawson accorded Laelaps an even higher standing than mammals, a comparison that would be considered a bit absurd once dinosaurs fell from grace. Even today, when theropods are generally considered to be the "peers" of today's dynamic mammalian predators, few paleontologists would conjure the image of a large one leaping thirty feet.


A more modern look at Dryptosaurus, the artist formerly known as Laelaps. By Frederik Spindler, via Wikimedia Commons.

We now understand Dryptosaurus to be a primitive throwback compared to its more advanced tyrannosaur contemporaries; while the best known Late Cretaceous North American tyrannosaurs are from the west, Dryptosaurus lived on the other side of the Western Interior seaway that split the continent in two, on a land mass called Appalachia. Unlike its western counterpart Laramidia, we have precious few geological windows into this time in the eastern US. Dryptosaurus is an intriguing critter. Why did it preserve more primitive tyrannosaur features? What was its environment like? The Earth's geological processes have unfortunately hidden many of these answers from us, then made the region attractive to human settlement, limiting our access to Mesozoic rock further.

I can't end this without contrasting the taxonomic change of Laelaps to Dryptosaurus with Torosaurus being possibly absorbed into Triceratops. While Scannella and Horner have their work cut out for them if their lumping of the two genera is to be accepted, at least they don't have to deal with the level of rancor that existed between Marsh and Cope. After all, renaming a species because its name is already taken is pretty cut-and-dry, and requires little evidence to justify: just show that it's been given to an organism in the scientific literature, and the matter is settled. But notice that a couple decades after Marsh reassigned it to Dryptosaurus, Knight still chose Cope's original Laelaps for his title.

Lumbering Dead Ends

Leaping Laelaps by Charles Knight, 1896

I am in love with that painting, one hundred percent. Knight's image is a good reminder that the now-deceased myth of dinosaurs as slow-witted, lumbering reptilian beasts wasn't always in fashion. Sir Richard Owen himself, the man who coined the term "dinosaur," noted that the fossil bones he'd examined exhibited both reptilian and avian characteristics.

But as the world grappled with the implications of Charles Darwin's great contribution to our collective knowledge, a different idea sprang up. People just weren't comfortable with the idea that Mankind, the finest and most sublime of creatures, shared a common ancestor with monkeys, rats, and lizards. Thus, the idea that evolution was an upward progression, with direction and purpose. Extinct creatures, such as our beloved denizens of the mesozoic, couldn't cut it. They were too stupid, dull, and unworthy of survival. Luckily, that idea proved to be stupid, dull, and unworthy of survival.

Knight's subject, Laelaps, was eventually renamed Dryptosaurus (after it was realized that Laelaps already was being used for a genus of mites) and now is considered a basal tyrannosauroid, (which is a less loaded way of saying it's a "primitive" one) of its own dryptosaurid family. It is the first American theropod, and was discovered by quarry workers in New Jersey shortly after the civil war. Crimony, that painting is inspiring.