Illustrations
of fossils go back at least to the Renaissance, if not further. However, reconstructing
those fossils as they may have been in life, the thing we generally refer to as
paleoart, is a relatively recent practice.
Fig. 1.: Duria Antiquior - A more Ancient Dorset, 1830. Take notice of the defecating animals.
Often
regarded as the very first piece of paleoart that tried to show fossil animals
as they may have been in the flesh is Duria Antiquior - A more Ancient Dorset,
by Henry De la Beche, from the year 1830. De la Beche’s watercolour portrays the
Jurassic ecosystem that has been uncovered over the years by his friend Mary
Anning, showing the different kinds of marine reptiles all interacting with
each other (mostly through violence) in their natural environment. The piece
was made to be sold to academic institutions as a teaching instrument, the
money going to Anning, who had unfortunately fallen on hard times (Davidson 2008).
Fig. 2.: A Coprolitic Vision, 1829, proving that humour has not changed much over the centuries.
But is this
really the first piece of paleoart, in the sense of depicting fossil organisms
as living beings? No, at best Duria Antiquior was the first
one used in an academic/scientific context. What some people may not know is
that Henry De la Beche was also a passionate caricaturist and one year prior he
had created quite a daft piece titled A Coprolitic Vision. What it
depicts is William Buckland, in full academic attire and geologist’s hammer in
hand, at the entry of a cave, where he sees living prehistoric mammals, flying pterosaurs
and marine reptiles… just defecating all over the place. The cave itself looks
like the inside of a digestive tract, with the pillars holding it up resembling,
well… you know. What this was meant to satirize was Buckland’s then current
obsession with coprolites (fossilized feces), which resulted in multiple works
on the matter. This itself has had a large influence on Duria Antiquior.
If you look closely at that later painting, you can also see various animals,
especially the ichthyosaur in the foreground and the plesiosaur in the centre,
dropping logs into the water. In his recent book Ancient Sea Reptiles,
Darren Naish claimed that this was supposed to show an instinctual fear response,
but it seems far more likely that this is a nod to both A Coprolitic Vision as well as the fact that De la Beche had used
Buckland’s work on coprolites as a basis for speculating what the foodweb in
ancient Dorset may have been like, helping him determine which animals in the
painting should feed on the others.
Fig. 3.: William Buckland sticking his head into a not-quite-extinct Kirkdale Cave, 1822.
So, is A Coprolitic Vision the oldest piece of paleoart then?
It may very well be the very first life reconstruction of Mesozoic marine
reptiles, but not of prehistoric animals in general. We can go back a lot
farther to find that. In 1822, for example, William Conybeare produced another satirical
piece, which again shows William
Buckland exploring a cave (De la Beche may have been deliberately riffing on Conybeare). This time it is the real life Kirkdale Cave in North
Yorkshire, where he is greeted by a group of cave hyenas. The cave was
originally a big mystery, due to containing the bones of a wide variety of
animals, such as elephants, hippos, rhinos, hyenas and bison, which (it was
thought) were not native to Britain. Buckland first analysed the cave under the
belief that the bones were remains from the deluge, having been swept into the
cave by the great flood from elsewhere on Earth. But as time went on, he
realized that the cave never had an open roof and that its only entrance was
too small to have fit in the whole bodies of most of the animals found in it.
Then he discovered that most of the bones had bite marks that fit the teeth of
the hyenas at the site. A suspicion grew, which was further supported by
Buckland finding objects in the cave that looked to him like petrified hyena droppings.
To confirm that this is indeed what it is, he went as far as comparing the
coprolites with the dung of living hyenas that he observed in British
menageries. Thus, it became obvious that all the remains at the Kirkdale Cave
were not swept in by the deluge but came from animals that had actually lived
close to it and were dragged into the cave by a hyena pack that inhabited it.
Rather than mocking him, Conybeare’s drawing is meant to celebrate this
discovery, as Buckland's study was the first reconstruction of an ecosystem from deep time.
Aided again by coprolites. One may question though if Conybeare’s drawing would
have actually counted as the restoration of an extinct animal at the time he made it, as it was only just
then being debated if the European hyena bones in question were from the extant
spotted hyena or belonged to a separate, extinct taxon. In that light, depending on his view, he may or may not not have been illustrating an animal he regarded as extinct, but rather one he
thought was still alive but has just lost its former range (which would be true
from a certain point of view, as the cave hyena is today regarded as simply a sub-species of the spotted hyena).
Fig. 4.: A mammoth mistake, 1805.
Going even
further back, we come across Roman Boltunov’s reconstruction of a frozen
mammoth carcass that Ossip Shumachov had discovered in the delta of the river
Lena in the year 1805. As is evident, he was apparently unaware that Georges
Cuvier had already determined by this time, based off the few fragmentary
mammoth bones that had made their way into Western Europe, that this animal was
a distinct species of elephant. Instead, Boltunov shows it as some kind of
giant… boar? Maybe? It is certainly quite an odd-looking construct. Boltunov was neither
an illustrator nor a paleontologist, but an ivory merchant, so the purpose of this
drawing was first and foremost advertisement, transmitted through private
communications between him and his contacts in St. Petersburg. He had bought
the carcass' tusks off Shumachov and was looking to sell them further, which
is how Michael Friedrich Adams got to know about the find (which is now named
the Adams mammoth). Adams was able to buy the tusks off Boltunov and also
retrieve the rest of the skeleton, including its frozen skin and other soft
bits, which were all assembled together in the Zoological Museum of St.
Petersburg.
Fig. 5.: Johann/Jean Hermann's mammalian pterosaur, giving the viewer a full-frontal assault, 1800.
The
absolutely oldest known, incontrovertible piece of art that tried to depict a
fossil how it would have looked in the flesh comes from Johann Hermann (Witton
2018). This drawing from the year 1800 depicts his interpretation of the
Bavarian fossil Pterodactylus,
interpreting it as a flying mammal, which, if you have been a long-time reader,
you will know was a
popular idea among Central European paleontologists at the time. He shows
it with fur, cute ears and external genitals similar to a bat, while faint
lines indicate where he thought additional membranes may have attached or how
the wing may have moved. This was sent in private along with his writings on
the fossil to Georges Cuvier and was apparently never meant for official
publication. In fact, only in 2004 was it rediscovered that this drawing even
existed.
So, what we
can say in the end is that while the first piece of paleoart in history was not
a shitpost, if we consider that the very first one was never published for over two centuries,
the second one was an odd curiosity among Siberian ivory merchants and the
third one just showed quite modern animals, De la Beche's coprolitepost could very well have
been many people’s first introduction to restored animals from deep time. The
backstories of the two caricatures discussed here are also a testament to the influence that the
study of coprolites has had on the history of early paleontology and paleoart,
the effect still being felt right up to Duria Antiquior.
I think
most of us can also agree that Hermann’s Pterodactylus and Butanov’s
mammoth have a certain shitpost energy to them.
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References:
- Davidson,
Jane: A History of Paleontology Illustration, Bloomington 2008.
-
Pemberton,
George; Mccrea, Richard; Gingras, Murray; Sarjeant, William: History of
Ichnology. The Correspondence Between the Reverend Henry Duncan and the
Reverend William Buckland and the Discovery of the First Vertebrate Footprints,
in: Historical Biology, 2008, 15, p. 5 – 18.
-
Rudwick,
Martin: Bursting the Limits of Time. The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the
Age of Revolution, Chicago 2005.
-
Taquet, Phillipe;
Padian, Kevin: The earliest known restoration of a pterosaur and the
philosophical origins of Cuvier’s Ossemens Fossiles, in Comptes Rendus Palevol,
2004, 3, p. 157 – 175.
-
Witton,
Mark: The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art,
Marlborough 2018.
Image
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