Visiting the Sauriermuseum Aathal - Part 4: The Main Hall

Kept you waiting, huh? Yes, I admit last year was not really productive, at least when it comes to this blog, and that was down to various reasons, but let us just hope this year will be better. For Part 3, go here. We finally return to the Sauriermuseum Aathal one last time to finally look at the main hall…

… which is either the best part about the museum or the most lacking. The reason is that this part of the museum seems to be the oldest and has undergone very little change since the 90s. I can personally attest this, as I remember almost every detail here also from my visits as a child during the early 2000s. For people who do not know much about dinosaurs, this is likely detrimental, as much of the information and especially the depictions are outdated (though most of the plaques go with the Dinosaur Renaissance approach of saurian biology, so the reader at least does not leave with a completely wrong vision of dinosaurs as big dumb lizards). For people like me, who are very much into old paleoart and nostalgia, this is pretty much heaven, since literally everything here still reeks of 90s Dino-Mania. In a meta sense, this part of the museum becomes in itself a (perhaps intentional) exhibit of the state of dinosaur science and pop culture from around the time the museum was first opened. I personally love this, perhaps because it is comforting knowing that at least one part of my childhood is still intact and well, but maybe also because of the fact I now know so much more about paleoart and history than I did back then, so I can appreciate all of this much more. Just look at the image above! You get Burian’s classic Tarbosaurus, right next to allosaur-style Spinosaurus and naked Struthiomimus. It is like seeing old friends again.

Two other old friends, “gumby-style” Therizinosaurus, as the authors of All Your Yesterdays call Ely Kish’s particular reconstruction of the animal, and naked Deinonychus. The latter’s appearance is especially funny, since, if you remember, the same museum also has an exhibit on feathered dinosaurs, with a fuzzy Velociraptor model. As the Natural History Museum of London has shown, however, even the big name museums seem to have trouble updating their resident Deinonychus. For what it is worth though, judging by the standards of when this model was likely made, it is pretty good. Especially the closed-mouth, lipped expression and bird-like gaze help make it look less monstrous and more like a normal animal. Regarding the outdatedness on Therizinosaurus, paleoartist Mark Witton has fairly recently kicked off a debate over whether particularly big coelurosaurs, such as this one and Deinocheirus, really would have had feather-coats, even if their ancestors evidently did, as they might have easily ran the risk of overheating. Make of that what you will.

This low-roofed part of the hall (a bistro is right above it) it mostly filled with general dinosaur-information and skull- and bone-replicas. You were even allowed to touch a real Triceratops bone while Burian’s rendition of the animal judges you (making this the second time I got to stroke a dinosaur bone). Having skull-replicas so close-up is always fun, because A) You get to stick your head inside a T. rex jaw, which is always great fun, and B) You can really appreciate the oddness of some of these anatomies. Just look at the freaky jaw-apparatus on Edmontosaurus at the bottom.

Also endearing are these wax models, showing paleontologists at work. I strongly suspect that the appearance of the one on the left is based off (young) Kirby Siber himself, while the one on the right is meant to be Ben Pabst, who still works at the museum as a preparator. Imagine you yourself are part of an exhibit in your own museum while you are still alive. I do not think I have ever seen that one before.

The biggest skeleton of the museum (apart maybe from one of the whales that Siber dug up and also exhibited) was of course the sauropod under the glass-roof. It is a replica of the real one in the Berliner Naturkundemuseum, which I believe is to date still the largest (nearly) complete dinosaur skeleton ever exhibited in a museum. Unfortunately, here the main hall also shows its age again, as the replica is still labelled Brachiosaurus. This was still seen as mostly correct in the 90s, but since 2009 the main consensus has become that the Berlin-skeleton is actually Giraffatitan. What is notable about the Aathal-replica is the posturing. Obviously, they had to lower the neck down a fair bit, as otherwise the skeleton would not have fit into the building, but the tail is notably raised above the ground (and has been that way since the very beginning). Compare this with the Berlin-original, which had its tail dragging on the ground all the way until its remounting in 2009. Another thing you can see here, which I also really like, is the usage of plants (real and plastic) which the museum lavishly uses to decorate many sections and exhibits. It makes the whole atmosphere feel much more organic and prehistoric, rather than the quite clinical look of some other museums.

Standing underneath the sauropod’s neck like squabbling children were these skeletons of Carnotaurus and Gastonia. Surrounding them were smaller fossils of petrified wood or the tail-club of Ankylosaurus. I do like the dynamic posturing of the skeletons here, though it kinda looks like the Carnotaurus is about to attack the Gastonia, which would be temporally and geographically impossible, as one animal lived in Late Cretaceous South America, while the other one lived in Early Cretaceous North America.

As you may have noticed in some of the pictures before, many of the bones and species plaques are accompanied by glass vitrines with life-models of the dinosaurs in question. While some, like this “Dracorex” (really just a young or female Pachycephalosaurus, let us not kid ourselves) seem to have been made more recently, others I remember standing here since time immemorial and preserve all of their outdated charm. I really want to know who made them.

Just look at this extremely retro Parasaurolophus for example. Not only does it stand upright like a man in a suit, it also has that membrane between its crest and neck. This was a somewhat popular interpretation during the 80s and earlier, I imagine because it gave the animal more of an aquatic look, to reinforce the stereotype that these duck-billed dinosaurs also lived like big ducks. This idea has mostly died out (last time I remember seeing this was in Disney’s Dinosaur from 2000), perhaps because this structure would have made it difficult for the animal to turn its head.

The other models are also really interesting to look at. I especially like the Apatosaurus miniature, because it accurately shows how strangely wide and robust the neck was, compared to older reconstructions that just made it a big, grey tube. Today there is even serious speculation that those bony protrusions on the underside of the neck may have had keratinous bulbs or even spikes, which the dinosaur then used for inter-species combat (or, in short, Bronto-Smash!).

And then there is this Camarasaurus, whose facial expression just keeps cracking me up. Seriously, does it not look like it is letting out a stoned Seth Rogen-laugh?

Out of the Howe-Quarry corridor, one comes to the outside area of the museum. Apart from a grilling area, a sand-pit where children could dig up a dino-skeleton and some photo-posing options, one is also greeted by an outdated, but nonetheless imposing T. rex enjoying his meal. Surrounding the model were various labelled plants from groups that have existed since the Mesozoic.

In fact, there would have been a small paleobotanical garden, but it was unfortunately not accessible that day due to Covid-restrictions. This also means I could only photograph these two life-sized sauropod models, an adult and a baby, from afar. They were actually animatronics that swung their heads and neck around. What species they were exactly I also could not find out, as their info-plaque was in the restricted area. All I found out is that they are meant to be turiasaurs.

Finally we come to the marine reptiles, starting off with this very retro family-tree. The mosasaurs seem to not have changed much since Charles R. Knight. Also there of course is Walking with Dinosaurs' oversized Liopleurodon, who, let us be honest, is still family, so his presence is always welcome.

Hanging from the ceiling are of course the three superstars from the Western Interior Seaway, Elasmosaurus, Mosasaurus (or maybe it is Tylosaurus, I am not actually sure anymore) and Archelon, which I photographed here from the upstairs dining area. Accompanying them were also fossils of various smaller ichthyosaurs, pliosaurs and marine crocodilians.

The Archelon in question is, by the way, a replica of the one in the Vienna Museum, or in other words the same one Kirby Siber dug up all the way back in the 70s. The turtle, which so many decades ago planted the seed of an idea for this museum has, at least in one form, found its way back into Aathal and I think that is a nice note to end this visit on.

I hope you had a fun time reading and I hope I inspired you to visit the Sauriermuseum Aathal yourself one day. It is an over all very enjoyable experience, which I recommend to everyone. Minor outdated stuff (which pretty much every museum has) do not distract from the great, charme, passion and love this museum has for its subject matter.

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Related Posts:

• Visiting the Sauriermuseum Aathal - Part 1: The Howe Quarry Dinosaurs
• Visiting the Sauriermuseum Aathal - Part 2: Exhibits
• My Trip to the Dinosaur Museum of Frick
• Fossil Hunting in the Jura Mountains of Holderbank
• Gresslyosaurus: The Eldritch Dinosaur that turned its Discoverer insane?

Online sources/Further Reading:

• Megafuzz under the microscope: how credible are restorations of giant fluffy extinct animals? by Mark Witton.

The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 4 - Familiar Beasts?

This is part 4 of a series. If you have not read the previous part, please do here.

Fig. 1: A young Rudolph Zallinger (1946) standing in front of his nearly completed mural, just to give you an idea of its size.

Last time we stayed in the dinosaur-cinema of the late 30s and early 40s, but as these will grow into increasingly stale stop-motion affairs in the following decades we will instead return to the world of artwork. In 1947 a major piece was finally completed after having been worked on for almost 5 years. The Age of Reptiles is a gigantic mural painted on the eastern wall of the Peabody Museum of Natural History’s Great Hall. The museum was first founded in 1866 by George Peabody as a sort of gift for his nephew Othniel Charles Marsh, whom we have met in part 2. In 1925 a new building, the Great Hall, was opened to house the gigantic mounted skeletons which Marsh had uncovered. Many of these still stand there today, including the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus. In 1942 oceanographer Albert Parr, then director of the museum, noticed a big problem with the hall. The large, grey bones in combination with the large, grey concrete walls made for a rather drab and unappealing look. He wanted to decorate the walls with some paintings that showed the dinosaurs in life restoration. At the time a young man of the name Rudolph Franz Zallinger was illustrating fossil algae for Parr. Zallinger was born in 1919 in Irkutsk, Russia, as the son of an Austrian war-captive and a Polish railway-engineer. When he was still a baby his parents fled with him to the US, where Rudolph would go on to study Fine Arts at Yale University, leading to him getting this job at the Peabody Museum. Lewis York, professor at Zallinger’s art-school, suggested to Parr that Rudy could do the job. Zallinger accepted and suggested that instead of creating many smaller paintings, he should instead make one giant mural across the entire eastern wall that shows the progression of time. His technique of choice was that of a fresco secco (Italian for dry plaster), a type of painting invented by Cennino Cennini in the fifteenth century. It is a form of mural rarely practiced today, as it requires enormous skill and many preparatory steps. Zallinger pulled it off however.

Fig. 2: The Triassic section of The Age of Reptiles. Note the trees in the foreground that separate the scenes. Because of the sheer size of the mural I had to scan a fold-out miniature from a guide-book I own, so I apologize for the low quality.

The end-result was a 4.9 x 34 meter mural showing the evolution of life from the Devonian all the way to the end of the Cretaceous. We begin on the right side with a bunch of lobe-finned fish, Eusthenopteron, crawling their way out of the swamp underneath alien-looking plants. As we progress to the left the world becomes populated by amphibians. Over a fallen tree we pass a across a river into the Permian where we see familiar fin-backed stem-mammals such as Dimetrodon. A large tree in the foreground cuts this scene off from the next one, which is set in the Triassic and shows us the first dinosaurs, such as Plateosaurus, in the familiar tripodal, upright posture. The Triassic scene is again bordered by another tree, which sections off the Jurassic. In the foreground a gigantic Brontosaurus wallows in its river, surrounded by the pterosaur Rhamphorynchus and the proto-bird Archaeopteryx. Behind it a very ungainly-looking Stegosaurus crawls around, while a very pot-bellied Allosaurus feeds off an indeterminate carcass. Another tree caps this period off as we enter the Cretaceous. We see familiar dinosaurs such as Ankylosaurus and Triceratops. Most prominent is of course T. rex, who looks even more pot-bellied and brawny than the allosaur and stands in the classic Godzilla-pose. Under the dinosaurs’ feet the small mammal Cimolestes scuttles around. At the very far left corner we see several volcanoes erupt. This signals off the end of The Age of Reptiles, as at this time volcanism was seen as the most likely explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, with the ash in the atmosphere creating an ice age that the giant reptiles could not survive.

Fig. 3: Zallinger’s depiction of Jurassic dinosaurs is definitely not revolutionary for his time in any way, however the quality of the art with all its details is impressive (though my bad scan probably does not accurately convey this) and on a higher level than previous work. It definitely does not have to shy away from Renaissance frescoes.

Like Fantasia, The Age of Reptiles likely only added to the Alien Prehistoric World Trope indirectly through misunderstanding and its wide circulation. A casual viewer not familiar with geologic history or the mural’s background might not understand that the piece depicts multiple time periods and that the large trees in the foreground are used to demarcate leaps in time. They might therefore come to think that the mural depicts just a single age, with all the lieforms living together at the same time. The volcanoes at the left corner, used to symbolize a singular event, might therefore also be understood as a casual occurrence of a prehistoric landscape from this time. This likely added to the already existing preconception that volcanism was high throughout prehistory, which we looked at in part 3. The creatures themselves also look quite bizarre. While preparing for the mural, Zallinger did get a crash course in vertebrate paleontology and paleobotany, but it is clear that he did not have the finest grasp of the dinosaurs’ anatomy. In many ways they resemble their lumpy and bloated counterparts from Fantasia, except their implied movement is much slower, in part because fresco secco does not lend itself well for dynamic scenes. We are reminded of the “huge, bizarre and ungainly shapes rising and subsiding in the landscape” that Charles Knight talked about in Part 2.

Fig. 4: Depicting Cretaceous dinosaurs alongside modern-looking flowering plants became a common trend from the 1940s onward. In hindsight Zallinger ironically depicted the flowers too modern, as the purported crown-group angiosperms depicted in the mural later turned out to be a lot more primitive than thought.

There are however some things that Zallinger improves over Disney and Knight when it comes to the alienation of the prehistoric world. Because of the fresco secco method, the texture and coloration of the dinosaurs looks a lot more lifelike and similar to a living animal’s appearance. While the animals are a bit ungainly in shape, they do not look as cartoonish as they did in Knight’s paintings. The coloration of the environment itself is more reminiscent of a modern landscape than anything in Fantasia. The sky and water are blue and the plants are in a pleasant green. The Age of Reptiles also began the trend of showing Cretaceous dinosaurs alongside something very familiar for us: Flowering plants! Most prominently we see a beautiful magnolia tree alongside Triceratops and T. rex. Behind them grows a willow. In previous paleoart, apart from anachronistic grass, it was convention to show dinosaurs alongside tropical  swamp- or rainforest plants, such as ferns, palms, cycads or ginkgos, all of which are vegetation we Western audiences usually associate with foreign, exotic places. What was often forgotten is that for most of the Mesozoic the dominant plant groups were the conifers, which even back then looked familiar to our modern pine trees and sequoias. Many Jurassic dinosaurs likely lived in environments that would not have been too dissimilar form North American redwood forests. What was also known for the better part of the twentieth century is that angiosperms, the flowering plants, existed at least since the Cretaceous (in recent years some evidence has pushed their possible earliest origin as far back as the Triassic or even the Permian). Zallinger was perhaps among the first to accurately reflect this in a major paleoart piece. The composition, coloration and vegetation all create something which was largely absent from previous depictions of the prehistoric world: Beauty. The thing that Knight thought prehistory entirely lacked. The Age of Reptiles is not a deriding depiction of a ruthless antediluvian world anymore, but rather a glorifying story of the conquest of land by the vertebrates, in the same style and with the same skill as any Renaissance painting. When Peter Dodson first saw the mural in person he allegedly almost wept.

Fig. 5: A lonely, sad 1950s Iguanodon standing in a dinosaur graveyard. It should be mentioned  that Augusta and Burian had to live through both World Wars and saw the beginning of the Cold War with its global threat of nuclear annihilation. Someone standing in a field of bones in this context likely adds at least some personal, perhaps even autobiographical connotations.

14 years before Zallinger another artist was born in the Eastern Bloc, more precisely in what is today the Czech Republic. Unlike Rudy he would however remain in this part of the world, as it would soon thereafter become a member of the Soviet Bloc. His name was Zdeněk Michael František Burian. As a teenager he joined the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, however he would not complete his studies and instead improve his artwork autodidactically while working rather laborious jobs. After doing his military service (partially working as the division painter) in the 1920s, he became an illustrator for various adventure books, including those of Jules Vernes, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling. Some German readers might recognize his art from some of Karl May’s Winnetou novels (to American readers unaware, Winnetou was what we in Central Europe used to think the Wild West was like). In 1935 Burian was discovered by paleontologist Josef Augusta, who asked the painter if he could illustrate extinct lifeforms for him. Paleoart-history was made and the two would work closely together on many popular books about prehistory until Augusta’s death in 1968. Burian would nonetheless continue working with other palaeontologists to produce more art until his death in 1981.

Fig. 6: This 1970 Burian-piece is often called the “Heroic Tarbosaurus”. You can clearly see why. With muscly, eagle-like legs, lifted tail and sharp sight Tarbosaurus bataar proudly dominates the landscape, looking for a new foe to face. Napoleon Crossing the Alps ain't got shit on this. The dinosaur no longer serves as a monstrous villain to the protagonist, rather it is the protagonist. I also just want to say that Burian was great at painting skies. As Clemens J. Setz notes, the literal air in many of his pieces is drawn as if the paintings were nostalgic photographs made with a 1970s-camera (Schalansky 2013, p. 6).

Burian’s work is iconic. If you don’t know the man, you nonetheless probably know his art, as it is widely circulated and its influences can be felt even today. Even Jurassic Park has payed hommage to him in one scene. His naturalistic artstyle has reached a level of feeling real which I think has not been achieved ever since, even with modern digital art. There are some elements that do create an alien atmosphere in his works. A good example is the Iguanodon standing in a field of bones, while the moon shines in the background. It is a very eerie, otherworldly scene. But even this piece is an example of how Burian subverts the Alien Prehistoric World Trope. In the original 1950s book where it is from it is used to illustrate a short story told by Augusta, named The Call of Silence. It is about an old Iguanodon whose herd gets attacked by a Megalosaurus. The attack separates the old animal from its family and it retreats to a dinosaur-graveyard to die alone. In that light the scene becomes very melancholic and humanizing. Burian and Augusta's view of evolution and Earth’s history was not one of a savage survival of the fittest nor a march of progress, as it may have been for people such as Charles Knight, but a melancholic series of individual stories about life and death. In Augusta’s stories and Burian’s accompanying artwork the dinosaurs are no longer villains or obsolete monsters, but the protagonists of their own stories, often being the victims of fate. The dinosaurs become tangible and even relatable creatures, animals that lived and died like you and me, not alien monsters.  There are two more notable things: Burian rarely, if ever, depicts scenes of outright violence. At best he shows predators running towards their prey or standing above an already killed animal, but with no blood or gore visible. He therefore largely defies the trope of the prehistoric world being more violent than the modern one. The second thing is that he applied his extremely good intuition of living animal biology onto his paleoart, which is why, unlike Knight, he managed to give his dinosaurs accurately proportioned muscle mass. Just compare his Tarbosaurus to Knight's Allosaurus from part 2. Burian's creations come off as way more believable, actual animals than in many works before him. This is especially impressive, because since he was a citizen of Soviet Czechoslovakia he never had direct access to the fossils concerned and instead had to heavily rely on photographs of mounted museum-skeletons, other artist's skeletal drawings and advice from the paleontologists he worked with. 

Fig. 7: Among Burian’s last paintings was this Barosaurus lentus from 1976. As Darren Naish suspects, it is most likely based on a similar piece by Robert Bakker. Burian was likely trying to adapt to the commencing Dinosaur Renaissance by portraying sauropods as erect-legged land-dwellers with their tails off the ground. What is often forgotten is that as far back as 1938 Burian depicted at least some dinosaurs as agile and active animals, most notably the bird-like ornithomimids, but also hadrosaurs and T. rex.

With the 1960s coming to a close it seems like dinosaurs and their world were on the way to lose their alienness. They were rather archaic and somewhat strange animals, but animals with their own beauty nonetheless. They were becoming familiar beasts, just like our lizards and tortoises, and the Alien Prehistoric World Trope may have started to die. However, the children who were inspired by Zallinger’s and Burian’s art were now growing up and became palaeontologists themselves. Looking back at the old art, the old books and the old mounted skeletons, one of them realized something that would forever change paleontology: “Something is very wrong with our dinosaurs.”

With that I thank you again very much for reading this part and hope to see you next time when we come to the Dinosaur Renaissance.

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts.

Literary Sources:

• Brusatte, Steve: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. A New History of a Lost World, New York 2018.
• Burian, Zdeněk/Spinar, Zdeněk: Life Before Man, Prague 1972 (Revised Edition from 1995).
• Davidson, Jane: A History of Paleontology Illustration, Bloomington 2008.
• Schalansky, Judith: Die Verlorenen Welten des Zdeněk Burian, Berlin 2013 (Naturkunden 8).
• Volpe, Rosemary: The Age of Reptiles. The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger’s Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale, New Haven 2007.

Online Sources:

• Palaeoart Memes and the Unspoken Status Quo in Palaeontological Popularization by Tetrapod Zoology (the SciAm Years)

Image Sources:

• Fig. 1: Volpe 2007, p. 2.
• Fig. 2-4: Volpe 2007, foldout.
• Fig. 5: Schalansky 2013, p. 105.
• Fig. 6: Schalansky 2013, p. 113.
• Fig. 7: Schalansky 2013, p. 178.