Resurrecting the Dinosaur
An abbreviated history concerning the (inherent) imperfections of Paleoart
In 1784, an Italian nobleman by the name of Cosimo Alessandro Collini was perplexed by an unusual fossil. Collini wasn’t often perplexed – thanks to a remarkably privileged upbringing, he spent much of his life studying, collecting, and cataloging “natural curiosities”. At 36 years old, his peers nominated him for the role of director at the newly formed Mannheim Cabinet of Natural History. Though many Europeans in the 18th century lived provincial lives, Collini was immersed in a world of oddities.
Even so, he had a hard time making sense of a peculiar set of remains excavated from a limestone deposit in Bavaria.
Naturalist and OG paleontologist George Cuvier was still 12 years away from presenting some of the first compelling evidence suggesting the concept of extinction. The father of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, wouldn’t be born for another quarter-century. So, understandably, Collini had no idea what to make of remains that clearly did not match the anatomy of any known living organism.
Of course, Collini was far from the first person to puzzle over a strange fossil. People have been stumbling upon fossilized remains since before recorded history. However, strange skulls and massive bones were attributed to mythological beasts for centuries. Dinosaurs became dragons, rhinoceros were mistaken for unicorns, and mammoths resembled cyclopses when nasal cavities were interpreted as eye sockets. Ancient Greeks wrote about treasure-guarding griffons in the same areas in which beaked Protoceratops skulls would one day be discovered.
Collini stood out because of how thoroughly unsatisfied he was with the explanations familiar folklore provided. Instead, he sought out scientific reasoning to help make sense of what he was looking at.
Upon examination, Collini noticed anatomical similarities the species shared with both reptile and avain specimens he had encountered in the past. He theorized that the long-dead animal may have used its long limbs as paddles to propel itself through the sea. Fossilized fish, crustaceans, and squids were discovered nearby, implying that the excavation area had once been underwater.
What’s more, deep beneath the ocean would be the only plausible habitat for such an unusual creature. How else could something so remarkable possibly exist undetected?
As our collective understanding of evolution and extinction expanded, naturalists eventually identified Collini’s specimen as a long-extinct Pterodactylus. While the marine-dwelling hypothesis was based on sound logic, further fossilized remains revealed wing membranes that informed proto-paleontogists that the pterosaurs ruled the sky rather than the sea.
Helpful as these discoveries were, assigning names to the to the bones hardly answered the question of what fossils actually looked like in life. As clear as it was that something once soared through the Jurassic heavens, the verdict concerning what that thing might have been remained murky.
Some experts guessed that the remains likely belonged to a true reptile – a hand-gliding lizard, more or less. Others hypothesized that the skeleton once belonged to a sort of flying marsupial, not unlike a bat.
Knowing what we think we know about pterosaurs, it’s hard not to laugh at some of the preposterous early depictions. But how accurate are our conceptions of even the most iconic of prehistoric creatures? As it turns out, the thing that most of us picture when hearing the word ‘pterodactyl’ probably isn’t a whole lot closer to the truth than the winged lizards and flying marsupials hypothesized hundreds of years ago.
Even over the last few decades, our understanding of pterosaurs has changed dramatically. Taking recently acquired knowledge into account, artist Mark Witton postulated that pterodactyls (specifically the massive Quetzalcoatlus) actually may have looked something like this:
As alien as these creatures seem, research supports that pterosaurs indeed sported flashy head crests, were covered in feather-like ‘pycnofibers’ rather than scales, and were competent quadrupeds. So why isn’t that information reflected in many of the most popular depictions of primitive life on Earth? Can we trust any of our existing notions concerning what the world once was?
For as long as man has studied paleontology, there have existed major discrepancies between fact and representation. But in order determine the hows and whys behind those discrepancies, it’s necessary to follow the practice all the way back to its earliest roots.
Paleontology first established itself as a legitimate field of study at the start of the 19th century, when the sciences of biology and geology were growing exponentially clearer. Almost immediately, there arose a need for paleoart – artistic works that attempted to illustrate prehistory. Art played a crucial role in the public’s understanding of the rapidly developing field, which in turn drummed up the excitement (and funding) necessary to justify further exploration.
Even in the earliest days, the importance of even the most speculative of illustrations was apparent. After purchasing a pair of 9-foot long mammoth tusks from a reindeer farmer, a Siberian merchant drafted a crude sketch from memory depicting the hypothetical animal the remains came from. The sketch is comically bad, depicting something closer to a giant horrible pig than the wooly mammoths we’re familiar with today. But the accuracy of the image ultimately didn’t really matter. Crude as it was, the drawing drummed up enough interest among the scientific community in St. Petersburg that excavators soon clamored to the frozen wasteland in hopes of finding more complete mammoth specimens. Once that was accomplished, more anatomically accurate depictions quickly emerged.
Nearly as fast as the need for paleoart was realized, it became clear just how much power it had over largely uninformed audiences. In an effort to procure funds for amateur fossil hunter Mary Anning, geologist Henry De la Beche sold lithographs depicting some of her finds along the shale cliffs of Dorset. The image itself is brimming with violence, and curious collectors loved it. A plesiosaur reaches its long neck out of the water to bite some sort of proto-crocodile, an ichthyosaur prepares the snap its jaws closed on an unsuspecting fish, and two pterosaurs engage in combat midair.
There wasn’t any sort of evidence suggesting that time before man was a hellscape in which every living thing is in a constant state of mortal combat. Rather, violence in nature was a common theme across Regency Era nature art as Regency Era Englishmen rarely had the opportunity to observe or encounter carnivores in their natural habitats.1 Therefore, meat eaters were often portrayed in their most beastial forms, despite the fact that many carnivores spend very little of their time actively hunting for prey.
Despite the exaggerated nature of the scene, the artistic trends of the era were never seriously taken into consideration when examining this early influential piece. Instead, it helped to cement the evergreen trope that dinosaurs were savage monsters with an insatiable appetite for carnage and blood2.
Among the earliest paleoartists, one individual in particular undoubtedly played the largest role of all in forming the dinosaurs that live inside our minds (and our media) today – a man by the name of Charles R. Knight. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had the following to say about Knight’s works:
“Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day”
As America’s Reconstruction Era gave way to the Gilded Age, a young man with a thick pair of glasses began frequenting the newly opened American Museum of Natural History. Despite his incredibly poor eyesight (he was deemed legally blind later in life), the freelance artist had undeniable talent. After years spent copying the illustrations out of his father’s natural history books, Charles R. Knight turned to the museum’s grand displays for exciting new subject matter.
Knight’s frequent visits, art supplies in tow, caught the attention of the institution’s curators. Eventually, they requested his help in painting a restoration of a prehistoric pig-like mammal called Entelodon. Using the Entelodon fossils on display, his knowledge of modern pig anatomy, and a little bit of imagination, Knight created his first piece of paleoart.
The museum was so pleased with his work that they continued to contract him well into the 1930s. Even today, much of the enthusiasm for prehistoric life can be attributed to Knight’s efforts. The Bone Wars at the end of the 19th century uncovered more than one hundred new species of dinosaur over the course of just fifteen years. Ultimately, it was Knight who took the most fantastic, groundbreaking discoveries of the era and converted them into something the general public could easily digest.
What set Knight apart from other early paleoartists? He was an artist rather than a scientist. He didn’t stop short at anatomical details – he thought about the environments they thrived in, the colors they might have radiated. Creatures extinct for thousands of years were gifted movement and soul, reborn from their eternal slumber. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of that contribution.
That said, some sacrifices to scientific integrity were unavoidable from the get-go. This isn’t necessarily the fault of any one individual – rather, speculation and invention become necessities when when trying to cobble something together from disparate pieces.
A beautiful example of how art based on even the most sound hypothesis can lead to widespread misconception lies in the case of Agathaumas, a hulking behemoth of a dinosaur discovered somewhere in southwest Wyoming in the 1870s. When it was initially dug up, it was a huge deal among paleontologists. Scientists estimated that it had a length of 30 ft and weight of 6 tons, which at that time made it the largest land animal ever discovered. Naturally, researchers requested that Knight recreate it.
The problem with this request was that only a few fragments of the dinosaur were ever recovered – some stray ribs and vertebrae, a hip bone. So Knight had to get creative. After studying the fossils, he noticed that they closely resembled the bones found in a Triceratops skeleton. Researchers also had on hand a partial skull from the same suborder of dinosaur as the Triceratops (thought today to maybe have belonged to a Styracosaurus). Without much else to work with, Knight frankensteined the maybe-Styracosaurus head to a Triceratops body to create his interpretation of the Agathaumas3.
As time went on and more excavations took place, it became clear that “Agathaumas” bones were actually pretty much indistinguishable from those of other ceratopsian dinosaurs. In all likelihood, there was never an Agathaumas to begin with and the bones were simply misclassified. Even if the Agathaumas did in fact roam the earth, no evidence ever emerged to suggest that it would have looked like the dinosaur Knight stitched together.
All of this did not stop the Agathaumas from making an appearance in the wildly popular stop-motion thriller The Lost World in 1925. The model used in the feature is directly based off of Knight’s illustration, despite the fact that the source material had very little basis in reality. As a result, a whole generation of moviegoers were introduced to a dinosaur that probably never existed.
As artists are wont to be, Knight was a pretty fickle dude. He absolutely could not tolerate any sort of constructive criticism. While he used his art to fight against many of the early stereotypes surrounding dinosaurs (i.e. that they were stupid, slow, and lumbering), he was also generally unwilling to correct mistakes that others spotted throughout his works.
The political and economic turmoil during the first half of the 20th century largely put paleontological pursuits on hold, leaving very few serious prehistoric depictions outside of Knight’s. As a result, even after his death, his art – flaws and all – played a direct role in inspiring the next generation of future paleontologists to continue digging.
About 70 years after Charles Knight started painting dinosaurs, the American Museum of Natural History welcomed a new research assistant by the name of John Ostrom. Though he entered as a geologist, the young academic soon shifted his focus toward vertebrate paleontology. He most likely spent hours looking over Knight’s paintings, as they lined the walls of the institution. Maybe they even inspired Ostrom to change his field of study.
Eventually, Ostrom presented compelling evidence concerning the dinosaur’s role as intermediary between reptile and bird. Further research suggested that the ‘terrible lizards’ were actually warm-blooded, highly active, intelligent creatures. This revelation sparked a Dinosaur Renaissance, a sudden demand for all things dinosaur and dinosaur-adjacent. Toys, books, television, and movies slowly began to create hybrid organisms – in part the compelling beings described by Ostrom and Knight, but also in part the terror-inducing monsters established in early paleoart.
This gradual build-up eventually culminated in the release of cultural mainstays like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time. Gone are the days in which we have nothing more than a single artist’s interpretation to base our knowledge of lost species off of. We’ve passed the point of no return concerning the dinosaur’s place in pop culture, as made evident by the hoards of children around the world between the ages of 4 and 8 that have adopted dinosaurs as an integral part of their identity.
And yet…we’re still pretty bad portraying our favorite prehistoric pals accurately. Not so much in a way that’s inherent to working with an incomplete subject, but in a way that largely ignores fact altogether. Take a minute to circle back the pterosaur, if you don’t believe me.
Perhaps it’s foolish to expect that popular media would want the “real” version of a pterosaur or a mammoth or a sabre toothed tiger or a triceratops. Cultural inertia is appealing when given the choice between titans shrouded in fable and animals that needs to sleep and shit and eat vegetables like the rest of us. What’s more, the fantastical anthropomorphized man-eaters we see on our screens serve the crucial role of reeling in the enthusiasts that care to scrape beneath technicolor cartoon caricature. Today, the artists most committed to creating paleoart that stays as close to scientific source material as possible are the ones that embraced false-dinosaur related content as small children.
As Collini or Knight or that Siberian merchant could tell you, though, there’s no perfect escape from the false dinosaur. Paleoart is a balancing act between fantasy and fact. We learn disjointed details with the passing of time, which give us small glimmers of what the real deal might have looked like. But a degree of inventiveness is an essential part of gluing those pieces into something cohesive.
Over the course of my research, I discovered a Turkish paeloartist named C.M Kosemen. Among his portfolio are dozens of dinosaurs with downy feathers, often more birdlike in build than the scaly, shrink-wrapped reptilians we’re used to. This isn’t surprising. Aside from emerging data backing feathered dinosaurs, Kosemen lists ornithological art as an influence.
What is surprising about Kosemen is that for every scientific recreation in his portfolio you’ll also find experiments in speculative biology, animals that the artist openly acknowledges are inaccurate or entirely make-believe. In the same breath that ornithological illustration is cited as a source of inspiration, so too are traditional Malay jinn and a series of drawings from an obscure sci-fi RPG guidebook.
Some might say that the dragons, cyclops, and griffins postulated hundreds of years ago were vanquished when the extinct species we know today were first recognized. In truth, the myths have simply transmuted. Unless we someday find a means of resurrecting the great beasts with the scarce organic materials we have left, our interpretations are bound to be colored by popular media and artistic trends. Purists will always denounce portrayals for mistake, and more often than not, their denouncements will be correct.
But ultimately, the holes in the source material – the wiggle room for interpretation, the potential to go beyond our understanding of the world around us – are what keep us hungry for more, defying death with each (imperfect) incarnate.
See virtually any depiction of a Tyrannosaurus for evidence regarding the sustained popularity of the “violent dinosaur” in media.
In terms of illustrating how similar the two species used to build Agathaumas truly were, this would be like sticking a bear’s head to a walrus’ body because they’re roughly similar sizes, sometimes inhabit the same areas, and both part of the order (Carnivora).
What a delightful trip through the evolution of Paleoart! And I laughed out loud when you got to Dinosaur Train. Great piece, Meghan!
This article is dyno-mite!