Classic Paleoart but with Donkey Kong Country Music

 

Dinosaur Books that Made Us - Eyewitness Dinosaur

Was the first piece of paleoart a shitpost?

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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Related Posts:

• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 1 - Antediluvia
• The weirdest things people have thought about pterosaurs
• Antique Paleoart: Dragons of the Air
• Antique Paleoart: Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World
• Stegosaurus: A history of reconstructions
• Diplodocus: A history of reconstructions - Part 1
• Diplodocus: A history of reconstructions - Part 2
• Antique Paleoart: The most illegal photos of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

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 Sources:

• Fig. 1: Wikimedia
• Fig. 2: Pemberton et al. 2008.
• Fig. 3: Wikimedia
• Fig. 4: Wikimedia
• Fig. 5: Witton 2018, p. 24.

Antique Paleoart: The most illegal photos of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

As you probably know, last month I was in London for my first ever Tetzoocon. But I was also there for a bunch of other stuff. One of them was the famous Crystal Palace Geological Court. While Tetzoocon offered a guided tour by Darren Naish through the park, I unfortunately could not attend that as it fell on the same day as our return flight. Therefore, me and my girlfriend went there by ourselves a day before the convention...

... just to unfortunately discover that the whole area was fenced off! Why? Apparently due to some construction work being done on the park's National Sports Centre. However, that stadium was quite removed from the place and none of that construction seems to have affected the area of the Geological Court, as there was no equipment, workers or anything dangerous even remotely close to the statues. It was a quite baffling decision by whoever was responsible. Pissed does not even describe how I felt, as, not knowing if I would ever return to London, this was the only opportunity I had to see Hawkins' famous statues in person. So we did something we probably should not have...

... and entered through a gap in the fence. Likely not the most legal thing to do, but in my defence, Naish's guided tour apparently had to resort to the same means, as even by Monday the fence had not been lifted for Tetzoocon. The photos I am thus showing in this post may therefore possibly be among the most illegal ones ever taken of the statues, so I hope you enjoy them. At the start of our tour into the forbidden land was the southern point of the Secondary Islands, inhabited by the labyrinthodonts.

The two species depicted by Hawkins for the court were one Labyrinthodon salamandroides (today classified as Mastodonsaurus giganteus) and two L. pachygnathus (today seen as an indeterminate mastodonsaurid). Their mistaken frog-like appearance stems not just from the fact that they were related to modern amphibians but curiously also because, at the time, the pelvic and limb bones of the ctenosauriscid archosaur Bromsgrovia walkeri were wrongly assigned to this genus, giving the impression of an animal with strong hindlegs (Witton & Michel 2022). Furthermore, Richard Owen, on whom Hawkins partially based his reconstructions, thought that the labyrinthodonts were responsible for the famous Chirotherium footprints, thinking that their odd arrangement was caused by an animal with abnornmally long hindlegs. Today we know these ichnofossils to have been produced by early archosaurs or archosauriforms... which in hindsight means the inclusion of Bromsgrovia in the reconstruction of these models is not that bad.

On the same island lived the two dicynodonts, of which I unfortunately could not get a good angle. These are Dicynodon lacerticeps (still valid) and Dicynodon strigiceps (indeterminate dicynodont today). There is not much I can say about these except that they are adorable, no matter how outdated they may be. It is interesting to note that while the body is obviously modelled after modern snapping turtles, the models, if you look closely enough, do not have an enveloping shell like a true turtle but only a carapace covering the back. As you can unfortunately see, the statues were also covered in quite a bit of moss and lichen, with D. lacerticeps having an obvious crack in its right leg.

Next came the various marine reptiles of the Jurassic, basking and swimming along the autumn shores. The ichthyosaurs are Ichthyosaurus communis (the large one at the back where you only see the front half), next to it I. tenuirostris (today Leptonectes) and at the front I. platyodon (today Temnodontosaurus). I find it a bit funny that I. communis was reconstructed as such a large beast. While Owen did think at the time that it could grow this large (Witton & Michel 2022), it is known today that it was among the smaller ichthyosaurs, about as imposing as a dolphin. As you can see especially on the Temnodontosaurus, the statues were also in a bit of disrepair, though at least the I. communis seems to have undergone recent restoration.

Among the plesiosaurs we find Plesiosaurus macrocephalus (the leftmost one, today seen as an indeterminate rhomalaeosaurid, possibly a juvenile Thaumatodracon), Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus (the snakey one in the middle, still valid) and Plesiosaurus hawkinsii (the one next to the tail of the Temnodontosaurus, today Thalassiodracon). Gotta love their serpentine and amphibious motions. An interesting thing I learned about the P. macrocephalus model is that its original head has gone completely missing (allegedly due to damage during the Second World War) and has been replaced by a copy from the P. hawkinsii model (Witton & Michel 2022). Originally, the Macrocephalus had a, well, larger head that more accurately reflected its rhomalaeosaurid nature.

Then there were of course the teleosaurs, usually identified as Teleosaurus chapmani (today probably Macrospondylus bollensis). Hawkins obviously modelled and posed them with reference to gharials, which, given the fossils, was a pretty obvious decision. Ironically though, these seemingly easy to reconstruct creatures show one of the more obvious errors in Hawkins' work. Even during his own time it was well known that teleosaurs had an odd armor arrangement, where the back was covered by two rows of plates and the belly by osteoderm sheets, producing an almost turtle-like arrangement (Witton & Michel 2022). But Hawkins seems to instead have simply used modern crocodilians as a reference for the skin instead of the already well-documented fossil data.

Then of course come the dinosaurs, who I think looked very pretty when surrounded by these autumny colours. Seeing these famous statues up close for the very first time really was an experience. Especially the Megalosaurus bucklandii was imposing, stalking through the primeval landscape with no less menace than any Hollywood T. rex.

 

 

Hylaeosaurus armatus was unfortunately turned away from the visitor path, though this was by Hawkins' design, maybe to show off its armour spikes. I did thankfully make a picture of its original concrete head, displayed at the top of the hill opposite the islands (the head on the current statue is a fibreglass replica). The head is honestly not all that bad of an approximation for an ankylosaur, which is funny, given that Hawkins actually reconstructed this skull based off a stegosaur jaw and sauropod teeth (Witton & Michel 2022).

Along with Megalosaurus, the two Iguanodon are probably the court's most famous denizens. Ironically, I think the reclining individual looked aesthetically more pleasing than the fully restored one at the back, as its degraded colour and overgrown texture blended in with the surrounding vegetation. On a different note, it has apparently become doubtful now if we can even call these Iguanodon, as most of the material that Hawkins used as reference actually came from what is today classified as the genus Barilium (Witton & Michel 2022).

Of the Pterodactylus cuvieri (today Cimoliopterus) I unfortunately could not get a good picture, as they were farther from the path and obscured by vegetation. Looking closely, much of the head of the poor quadrupedal individual seems to be missing. In the Jurassic section of the Secondary Islands there also used to be a second pair of pterosaurs, Pterodactylus bucklandi (reconstructed by Hawkins as small pterodactyloids but today recognized as being based off rhamphorhynchoid bones), which have gone missing twice. The original statues first went missing in the 1930s and were replaced in 2002 with fibreglass replicas. These lasted for only three years before either strong winds or vandals damaged them too much to still be exhibited.

At the end of the Secondary Island, by the weir connecting it to the Tertiary one, was then Mosasaurus hoffmanni, which just looked great. I would honestly take this one over the Jurassic World version. The head of Hawkins' model always reminds me of a bearded dragon.

 

 

The paleotheres were in a less stellar condition. Palaeotherium medium was pretty worn down, while the P. minus (today Plagiolophus minor) had its whole head missing. Again! The original head went missing somewhen between the 50s and the 90s and was replaced by a copy from the P. medium. Vandals had decapitated this restored model again in 2014. Of course it can always be worse: There used to be a third statue, an elephantine Palaeotherium magnum, which has gone missing completely! When it comes to accuracy, it is today generally doubted that these animals had trunks, as the skull does not show enough signs for the attachment of such an organ. On a side note, fossils of palaeotheres like Plagiolophus are also found in Switzerland and are even exhibited in the museum I work for. 

The Anoplotherium commune were in much better shape. Anoplotheres are actually starting to become some of my favorite extinct mammals, due to their unique anatomy, which Hawkins already portrayed with broad accuracy. Their vaguely dog-like appearanc just makes me want to pet them. Indeed, I think many of these early mammals would have made for great pets. Like the palaeotheres, anoplotheres were archaic ungulates native to Europe during the Paleogene and died out during the Eocene-Oligocene-Boundary, as the drying up of the Turgai Strait allowed for animals from Asia to migrate to the continent. Their fossils have also been found in Switzerland.

Of the Megatherium (whose right hand seems to be missing) I again could not get good pictures, as it was surrounded by vegetation. But imagine being an early human in the Americas and encountering such a towering beast in the middle of the woods just like this.

At the end were then the Megaloceros, which were in varying states of disrepair. Among them was still the "fawn", which is today known to actually be a misplaced Xiphodon gracilis that was once part of a whole herd on the Tertiary Island.

And at last, here is a bit of artwork I found in and around the court. Cute stuff. That concludes today's post. What will be next? I do not know. Maybe I will reflect on my visit to the Natural History Museum or I will make another non-fiction post on Har Deshur. See you until then!

Related Posts:

• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 1 - Antediluvia
• Antique Paleoart: Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World
• Antique Paleoart: The Lost Paleozoic Museum 
• Hawkinspunk Spinosaurus
• Tetzoocon 2022 - Day 1
• Tetzoocon 2022 - Day 2 
  

References:

• Witton, Mark & Michel, Ellinor: The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, Ramsbury 2022.