Vintage Dinosaur Art: De Oerwereld van de Dinosauriërs - Part 3

We haven't finished with De Oerwereld yet - not while I can still harvest more posts from it. Before proceeding, be sure that you've already ogled Part 1: Theropods and Part 2: Sauropodomorph Boogaloo. This week it's the turn of assorted ornisthichians, starting with a stunning work of art that was turned into one of the best-loved palaeo-posters since before time began (I'm in an '80s sort of mood, you see).

Mark Hallett might just be my favourite palaeoartist, if not of all time, then definitely of the hyper-detailed, 'photorealistic' school. Plenty of artists have produced mind-boggling works that are technically superb, but can often feel rather staid, stately and a little lifeless. Hallett's true skill, beyond his already highly impressive technical ability, is in avoiding this. Although extremely detailed, there is a boldness, an energy in his work that is often missing from that of other 'photorealistic' artists. This hugely popular painting, of two fighting Triceratops, is certainly among his very best work - I can but apologise for only being able to provide details here, rather than the whole thing.

In such an action-packed scene, it's easy to miss the enormous care that Hallett has taken in detailing not only the animals, with their highly lifelike expressions and carefully researched anatomy, but the surrounding environment. In a Hallett piece, there will always be splashing water, crumbling earth, and vegetation being twisted and snapped. Like the other artists in this book, Hallett's work has aged remarkably well, and often any historical errors are virtually insignificant. In this case, for example, I'm pretty sure that the uniting of Triceratops' digits into a single elephantine 'paw' would be frowned upon these days...if anyone noticed.

Doug Henderson's work is frequently distinguished by its expert use of elaborate foliage, so it's interesting to see a piece like this, in which two drowned centrosaurs appear (at first glance) to be suspended in an ethereal void. There is a wonderful dreamlike quality here - we are strangers in this alien world, which belongs to the plesiosaur, itself heedless to the dramatic sight of the giant animals' bodies drifting idly by above. Equally, there is a beautiful melancholy, as in so much of Henderson's art...

...Like this, for example. In a lot of palaeoart, the animals will practically be jumping down our throats, as if they're putting on a show for us (it's almost possible to smell the popcorn). Instead, Henderson offers us furtive glimpses through the thick underbrush of a world that is as lush and filled with life as it is hostile and unwelcoming. Dinosaurs, so often depicted as the lords of the Earth, are typically hopelessly dwarfed by their surroundings. There's something so very real about it all.

Of course, it's not all Hallett and Henderson - there are also shots of superb models sculpted by Stephen Czerkas, which have themselves been remarkably influential (for example, check out some of Raul Martin's earlier stuff). Handily presented from every angle, it's possible to see that Czerkas has accurately given the animal sauropod-like columnar 'hands', something that people have seemingly never been able to get right.

Doug Henderson did stegosaurs too - of course he did. They're just way over there, and you'll have to clamber through the forest to catch a glimpse of them. One is reminded of forest elephants gathering at a lakeside clearing - big animals with an unlikely aptitude for remaining hidden. Here, the trees seem testament to the destructive power of a herd of huge herbivores - be they the stegosaurs themselves, or their considerably larger neighbours. Why, the dinosaurs are quite literally framed by the very destruction they leave in their wake. The background stegosaurs, exposed to the sun's glare, take on a ghostly and elegant quality that seems quite at odds with their lumbering, cumbersome appearance.

Speaking of lumbering and cumbersome...and thyreophorans...the book includes Hallett's rendition of the famously spiny ankylosaur, Saichania. It doesn't quite appear flat and wide enough, but is nevertheless imbued with Hallett's scarcely matched lifelike quality. Much of this is owed to the texture work - the animal's thorny armour glints and gleams menacingly, while its gnarled head appears solid enough to touch. It's possible to imagine running one's hand over its knobbly surface, right before having one's head stoved in by a high-velocity bony lump.

Much of the longevity of Hallett's work is owed to the fact that Hallett restored his animals in a way that was anatomically rigorous, while also avoiding the worst excesses of the 'dinosaur streamlining' that went on in the '70s and '80s. In fact, and while it's no William Stout zombie-o-saur, his Hypacrosaurus is unusual in having a rather shrink-wrapped head and pencil-thin neck. Nevertheless, it's very difficult to deny that it is an absolutely stunning piece of work, as per bloody usual. Bah.

And finally...the work of some upstart named John Sibbick. Here, some moronic Ouranosaurus are trying their very best to make a racket and upset Old Man Sarcosuchus, a world-weary soul who would just like to get some rest before he sets out once again to do battle with Suchomimus and what have you. Really, though, this is a lovely scene, with a beautifully well-observed river delta and an exquisitely painted gharial-zilla.

De Oerwereld van de Dinosauriërs will return! There's an awful lot of Palaeozoic art in this book that's begging to be shared, including some seldom-seen Sibbicks, alongside Henderson works so beautiful they'll move you to muted tears accompanied by a sad string soundtrack. We'll be back.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: De Oerwereld van de Dinosauriërs - Part 1

Many of you are sure to recognise this one - its original English title was Dinosaurs: a Global View. The Dutch title - De Oerwereld van de Dinosauriërs - translates to something like 'the primordial/primeval world of the dinosaurs', which might sound a little more hackneyed (and possibly cheesy), but in this case actually sets the tone perfectly. If any triumvirate of artists was truly capable of transporting the viewer back to the Mesozoic, it would have to be Hallett, Sibbick and Henderson. What a team!

Originally published in 1990, with this Dutch edition arriving in 1993, most (if not all) of the artwork in this book dates from the preceding decade. Given the amount of, shall we say, ill-informed art that came out of that decade, it's easy to forget the sheer quality of the work being produced by the top-flight palaeoartists of the time (especially if your peculiar hobby is reviewing old dinosaur books for a certain blog). One could pluck any one of the plates from this book and it would be worthy of hanging in a hall and charging an entry fee to see.

As I did previously with the likes of Life Before Man, I'll endeavour to cover a reasonable amount in a handful of blog entries, until such a point when everyone's bored, or I'm threatened by somebody's lawyer. The book's chapters are essentially ordered chronologically through the Mesozoic, but I hope you don't mind me theming my posts around different groups of animals. This week - theropods! (Oh, and if you were wondering, the second-hand section on the first floor of the branch of De Slegte in Apeldoorn is an absolute treasure trove. I'm going back there for another book...)

Mark Hallett's Staurikosaurus seems a good place to start - not only does it deal with a Triassic subject, but is an excellent showcase for Hallett's mastery of the many subtleties that make a restored animal appear lifelike. Intricate details such as the stretching and sagging skin around the animal's limbs, the soft tissues in and around the mouth, and the reflection of light on its scales add up to create a quite uncanny, not to mention very beautiful, portrait of this 'primitive' theropod. I remember a jobbing illustrator's knock-off of this piece appearing in Dinosaurs! magazine back in the day, but of course I didn't realise it was a copy until very recently. Seeing the original after all those years was a revelation.

Unfortunately, my rather small and rubbish scanner can't possibly do justice to a lot of these pieces, and I did deliberate over whether to leave this particular one out. However, in the end I simply couldn't resist sharing at least a small part of it. Therefore, may I present a detail from Doug Henderson's jaw-dropping Coelophysis scene. Henderson is most famous for developing a style in which prehistoric animals are mere components of a much wider, usually stunningly rendered landscape, and so it is here. Although this fragment doesn't show it, this scene is utterly dominated by a gigantic, fallen tree bridging the river, and overshadowed by the branches of another (standing) tree. In the context of the whole piece, the Coelophysis appear tiny and vulnerable parts of an ecosystem on a colossal scale, their swarming numbers melting into the central river. Simply a masterpiece, and one of many.

Back to Hallett, and here two Dilophosaurus struggle over an unfortunate Scutellosaurus. The animals here have a very different 'feel' to the Staurikosaurus - although equally lithe and sleek, their skin appears tougher and more leathery as the result of masterful texturing. It's a violent scene, the likes of which have become something of a palaeoart cliché now, but again displays a superb attention to small details - in terms of the animals' anatomy (check out those legs), their interaction with the surrounding environment, and the environment itself.

Henderson's work is often imbued with a melancholic quality that's very unusual for palaeoart. The monochrome helps, of course, but the composition here is also key. The skulking Ceratosaurus, its back turned to the viewer, displays an air of indifference in spite of the hulking carcass of the sauropod, which cleverly blends into the landscape. A gnarled tree with bare branches and a fallen log frame the animals in the centre. It's haunting - and how many artworks featuring Mesozoic dinosaurs can you say that about?

In addition the illustrations, the book contains a small number of photographs of models sculpted by Stephen Czerkas. The scaly skin of this Deinonychus has certainly aged it now, but its intricate detailing and lifelike quality still impress. Also of note is the arrangement of the hands, with the palms facing correctly inward and folded down (although not back against the arm, as in modern birds). It's remarkably prescient for the time.

I'm running out of superlatives with which to describe Henderson's work. Instead, you can just picture me gawping pathetically, a sliver of drool descending slowly from the left edge of my gaping cakehole. (I'd include a photograph, but I think we'd lose readership.) Regardless, this scene depicts Albertosaurus - not chasing or biting or being stabbed in the guts by anything, but simply taking a leisurely stroll through a stupendously beautiful Hendersonian forest. It's classic Henderson. Niroot remarked how much Henderson's work reminded him, in terms of composition in particular, of Oriental painting. Whether or not Henderson really was influenced by Oriental painting I don't know, but it's certainly lovely to think so.

Speaking of things that look lovely, here's something that really doesn't - Czerkas' Carnotaurus. However, that's only because the animal itself was such a pug-faced weirdo, and is not a comment on Czerkas' sterling sculpting skills. Certain very minor details (the hands) would not be regarded as accurate today, but overall it has aged remarkably well, and (again) has a definite likelike quality. The animal appears pleasingly bulky and fleshy, although not excessively so, and exudes a certain predatory menace.

Although it is seemingly quite rare for Henderson to produce anything as conventional as a scene of predation, he naturally manages to excel at them nonetheless. Here, the familiar tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus launches an attack against the hadrosaur Saurolophus. Against the greens and blues of the hadrosaurs and sunlit river, the vibrant red head of the theropod is a startling focal point. Water was another Henderson specialty, and here it is possible to get a sense of the deceptive power in the flow of the river, as the individual at the bottom right struggles gallantly upstream. In the context of this book, the often quite detached, one might say 'peaceful' and painterly quality of Henderson's work contrasts effectively with the more visceral and immediate quality of Hallett's, and they compliment each other perfectly.

And finally...this is perhaps the most unusual piece in the book and, surprise, it features Tyrannosaurus. If any readers could inform me as to the exact age of this one I'd be very grateful, as it seems to me to be a little anachronistic, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was one of his older pieces. It's gorgeously painted, of course, but the tyrannosaurs have a peculiarly crocodilian vibe and rather long tails, both of which remind me very much of 1970s palaeoart. There's also that Pteranodon, which is...odd.

As for those hornlets over the eyes - could the tyrannosaur in that movie trace that particular feature of its now instantly recognisable appearance back to this painting...?

There's more to come from De Oerwereld van de Dinosauriërs! Please do come back next week, on Monday, or maybe a bit later, depending on whether or not I pull my finger out.

Stephen Czerkas in Discover, 1989

If you've been following this blog for a while, it probably won't come as a shock to learn that I collect old magazines that feature dinosaurs. Many antique shops have stacks of vintage magazines, and those covering dinosaurs in some way make up a decent portion of my "to scan" stack.

One of these recent acquisitions was an issue of Discover from March of 1989, featuring a profile of Stephen Czerkas by long-time dinosaur writer Don Lessem, roughly coinciding with the publication of Czerkas's book, My Life with Dinosaurs. Czerkas was an up-and-coming dinosaur researcher and sculptor who had done creature design on the 1978 B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs. Lessem's article focused on Czerkas as a paleontology outsider, one of those researchers who has knowledge, but not the degrees to show for it.

Plenty of paleontologists arrive at their profession by unconventional routes within or without of academia, and have made valuable contributions to the science. As in any field of study, those scientists have an uphill battle and face greater scrutiny - and occasionally bias - when presenting their ideas to their peers.



Preceding the article is the above photo of Czerkas in his workshop. It's striking just how similar these Deinonychus models are to what, just a few years later, would be called Velociraptor in Jurassic Park (a subject Brian Switek touches on today at Dinosaur Tracking). The movie wasn't even in production yet, and I can't find any connection between Czerkas' work and that of Stan Winston Studios, who created the movie's villains. But as Czerkas is not listed as a consultant on the movie, this may be a simple case of convergent evolution.

Reading this article in 2011, it's impossible not to view it through glasses stained by the "Archaeoraptor" fiasco of a decade ago. Czerkas's place in the history of paleontology will forever be connected with the controversy; google his name and you'll turn up droves of creationist blogs and websites that attempt to discredit evolutionary theory with "Archaeoraptor," the faked "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.

Czerkas and his wife, Sylvia, bought "Archaeoraptor" for their Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, UT, promoting it to National Geographic, who had an exclusive story planned about its impact on our understanding of bird evolution. The problem was, the fossil was a mashup, eventually revealed to have been composed of Yanornis, Microraptor, and another critter. What makes the Czerkases' championing of the fossil infuriating rather than sad was that they didn't listen to Phil Currie and Tim Rowe's concerns about its legitimacy. Apparently blinded by the coming glory, they pushed on. The story was published. The fossil was analyzed further. It was discredited, and Czerkas ended up apologizing for his "idiot, bone-stupid mistake."

"Archaeoraptor" was an avoidable controversy, and one of its most annoying consequences was that it offered another arrow for the creationist quiver. It's a flimsy arrow, as all of their arrows are. The problem is the size of the quiver and the amount of time it takes to demonstrate the weakness of their many arguments. That "Archaeoraptor" is used at all baffles me. It's a clear indication that many creationists simply don't care about the rules of logic. "Archaeoraptor" was embarrassing for the paleontological community. For a minute. Once other scientists took a good look at it, it became a victory which shows why science is such a powerful tool for understanding our world: it has built-in mechanisms to remove bias and to correct mistakes. Want to poke fun at "arrogant evolutionists" for a mistake? Fine. I understand schadenfreude. It's fun. But it seems counterproductive to slam a group of people for their human fallibility when your own faction happens to be populated by fallible humans, too. That's the kind of thing that comes back to bite you on the proverbial rear end.

"Archaeoraptor" also serves as a lesson in the dangers of the black market fossil trade. In a 2002 article about "Archaeoraptor," paleontologist Kevin Padian explained to National Geographic how the tragic tale started, and it's such a perfect summation of the thorny issue, it deserves to be quoted at length here.

"The lesson in this should be the importance of conserving fossils and protecting them," said Padian. "Chinese villagers who found the specimen don't make a lot of money, and they don't know what these animals look like. There was no hoax. These are poor people trying to make a little extra money by selling fossils on the black market."

It's illegal to export fossils out of China, but a thriving black market exists, driven by poverty, powered by bribery, and feeding a seemingly inexhaustible desire for fossils among hobbyists.

Huge quantities of fossils are illegally excavated and smuggled out each year. And no wonder; the Archaeoraptor fossil sold in the United States for $80,000.

This is an internationally important region," said Padian. "The workers there are very poor; if they were better rewarded for working with scientists there would be no need to enhance the fossils, or for a black market at all. The international community needs to take steps to protect these fossils."

Looking back on Lessem's article twenty-odd years later, Czerkas's career has unfortunately done little to raise the general respectability of non-credentialed paleontologists. Oddly enough, even though "Archaeoraptor" never became the crown jewel in his museum and was a source of great embarrassment, it is featured prominently in Cerkas's anti-BAD* essay at the museum's site [PDF]. It lays out his view, which holds that dromaeosaurs aren't dinosaurs at all, and the fact that the opposite is the consensus is a figment dreamt up by cladists.

I suppose I should close on a happier note, though. Czerkas may not have been involved with Jurassic Park, but he has stamped his name on celluloid history. The early 80's Harryhausen-esque B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs included his model work. Here's a sample of it.



* "Birds Are Dinosaurs"