99% Invisible - 326- Welcome to Jurassic Art

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will never see how these animals lived with our own eyes. There are no photos or videos, of course, which means that if we want to picture how they look, someone has to draw them. The illustrated interpretation of dinosaur morphology and behavior has had a big impact on how the public views dinosaurs and it's gone through a couple of key turning points, including a more recent push for more speculative paleoart. Welcome to Jurassic Art

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Anyone who has had kids knows that they go through obsessive phases that can last anywhere from a few days to several years. I went through a lot of phases growing up. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. There was a brief train phase, then in preschool I was obsessed with farming equipment. I could list obscure European tractor brands off the top of my head, like an old Italian wheat farmer. But I think my most intense obsession, like many kids, was dinosaurs. I knew more about dinosaurs at the age of five than I do now.

And I was all but certain that I would one day become a paleontologist. I don't know exactly where this dinosaur obsession came from, but I think part of it was just that dinosaurs looked so cool. I had all these books filled with incredible drawings of colorful dinosaurs leaping around, roaring, and tearing into one another. I fell in love with the artwork in those books. And at least for the time being, art is the only way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel or some Jurassic Park Resurrection scenario, we will never see these animals with our own eyes.

There are no photos or video, which means that if we want to picture how they look, someone has to draw them. Hello, I'm Dr. Robert Bucker, known to the folks in North Texas as Jurassic Bob. I dig bones, dinosaur bones. Bob Bucker is one of the most famous living paleontologists, and he also happens to be a very skilled paleo artist. He thinks the two go hand in hand. Art is very important in teaching natural history science, maybe all science. Teach everyone art, and everyone music too patterns.

Geez. I like Bob a lot. When I interviewed him in his studio in Boulder, Colorado, he showed up in hour early and he brought his own snacks. He's got snacks here. He's got coffee and some apple pie. Free range apple pie. This is so liberal.

This place. This is so bolder. Cage free Apple Pie. Once we got started with our interview, Bob said that like me, he got obsessed with dinosaurs and dinosaur art pretty early on. How I got hooked was a piece of journalism from 1953, Life Magazine cover story called The World We live in and a pictures of dinosaurs and whatnot the cover Image was the head of a long neck dinosaur sitting in a swamp munching on grass with a stegosaurus in the background Sort of staring off into space and inside was this long article about evolution after two hours with that life magazine I announced to my startled parents,

mom and dad I want to grow up and be a vertebrate paleontologist. And dad had no expression, and mom smiled and said, that's nice, dear, it's a stage you'll outgrow. But unlike me, dinosaurs weren't just the childhood phase for Jurassic Bob. By the time he headed off to college, a career in vertebrate paleontology was still the game plan. But it was kind of a strange time to be entering the field. In the mid-20th century, American dinosaur science was in a bit of a rut. Dinosaurs were considered big, dumb, cold-blooded reptiles. Evolutionary failures destined for extinction.

And that view of dinosaurs affected how they were painted and drawn. Most of the paintings of dinosaurs, they're not moving. They're not interacting with each other. There's no spark of intelligence and social life. And their bodies were like hulking masses of flesh. The way Brontosaurus and Diplodicus, the biggest dinosaurs, were illustrated they were like giant gray vacuum cleaners,

with very, very short legs, and they were slowly pulling themselves across the landscape or sitting neck deep in a fetted swamp. Dinosaurs were often drawn sitting in swamps, like on that live magazine cover. The thinking was they were so large they couldn't possibly hold up their own body weight. And if they were drawn on land, they usually dragged their fat tails behind them as they walked. And that's where we were in the early 1960 early 1960s dinosaurs were sad, cold-blooded dead ends in the history of life. But paleontology was about to go through.

A spectacular and unanticipated U-turn. And a young Bob Bocker just off to college would find himself right in the thick of the action. Freshman year, the Yale Geology Department took me a bunch of other freshmen out today. The trip out west was led by one of Bob's professors at Yale. A paleontologist named John Ostrom. And among other things, we dug up four raptures. They were a new species of raptor that Professor Ostrum named Dynonicus.

Meaning terrible claw. And the bones were found really close together. Presumably they'd lived together. They were a pack, maybe intelligent. But what really got Professor Ostrum excited was the anatomy of the skeleton. After studying the fossil remains back at Yale, Ostrum concluded that Dynonicus had not

been a slow plotting swamp creature. It had been fleet-footed, agile, and extremely active. Ostrom began to argue that if you really looked at the anatomy of many dinosaurs, they looked less like lumbering lizards and more like super-athletic birds. And his student, Bob Bocker, found this idea really compelling. He remembers looking at a skeleton of a different dinosaur called Ornithelestes. He really did look like a road runner with a long-boney tail and teeth, but wow, it just spoke agility. But then you read the textbooks and you're not supposed to believe that.

As an undergraduate, Bacher dissected modern animals in an effort to better understand dinosaur musculature. And he concluded that the old stereotypes about stupid sluggish dinosaurs just didn't hold up. They weren't slow and sloppy. Now, this idea wasn't totally new. Bacher says that for decades, going back as early as the mid-19th century, there had been people saying that dinosaurs were smart, active, and bird-like. But these facts were forgotten about, really.

They dropped out of textbooks. So Walker decided to publish a paper in a Yale journal and his editor says, I know what you should call this study. And I said, what? She said, you should call it the superiority of dinosaurs. I said, yeah, that's it. They weren't evolutionary husbands.

They weren't dead ends in the flow of Darwinian process. They were top of the line. They beat everybody. But convincing people that dinosaurs were actually totally different than they had been depicted for the past 60 years was going to require more than a few good academic papers, to really change people's minds. Sometimes you got a show instead of tell.

And remember, Bocker was a skilled illustrator as well as a scientist. And so when John Ostrom wrote his definitive paper on Dynanicus, he asked Bocker to do the illustration. And I positioned the bones as if his raptor was running. In the picture, the raptor is nearly parallel with the ground. It's left leg springing forward, it's right leg curled tightly against its torso, preparing for the next stride. The tail is high in the air, it's beautiful and kind of terrifying. Austria put the picture right on the front of his paper,

and it quickly became an iconic drawing. No one had ever seen anything quite like it. Bacca is like a renegade. This is Darren Nish, a paleontologist based in the UK. He's got like a flamboyant appearance, he insists on wearing a cowboy hat all the time, he's got a giant bushy beard, and right from the late 60s when he's starting to talk about this stuff, he's drawing these agile, active dinosaurs. Bucker finished up at Yale and went off to graduate school where he continued to speak truth to the slow, dumb, dinosaur establishment. He wrote academic and popular articles about how impressive dinosaurs had been. And he illustrated them all himself. He drew dinosaurs bounding across the prehistoric landscape like track and field stars, with

live muscular bodies. So prior to this time, an animal like Tyrannosaurus would have been drawn as like a guldzilla type animal dragon it's telling the ground, it's not a particularly attractive beast, but under backer you've got this thing shown with massive bulging muscles. And Bakker's athletic dinosaurs became a model for other paleo-artists. So when my dinonicus drawing appeared, some artist younger than I said, huh, okay, now we can do it. Artists like Gregory Paul embrace this new, exciting vision of dinosaurs.

They started giving their dinosaurs vibrant colors, and occasionally feathers to really emphasize their bird-ness. Soon images of athletic, colorful dinosaurs were everywhere. And they helped fuel the revolution that was taking place in paleontology. Throughout the 70s, more and more paleontologists got on board with Austro and Bakers theories. They found new fossils and footprint evidence suggesting that dinosaurs have been more blooded, intelligent, and bird-like. This period has become known as the dinosaur renaissance, a moment when we totally rethought

all of our assumptions about these incredible prehistoric animals. In Derenneich, things art was a huge part of its success. I think that part of the reason that the dinosaurs of the dinosaur were nice ones, the dinosaurs of Auschmann and Bacchus, drew in so many scientists in the 1670s was because it was accompanied by brilliant visuals. If anyone missed out on this scientific revolution and still thought that dinosaurs were slow and stupid, that ended in 1993. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are very active.

The Dinosaur's of Jurassic Park in 1993, they are the dinosaur renaissance. And when that movie came out, the whole world got to see these fierce, athletic creatures running through kitchens and eating lawyers off of toilets. And once you've seen the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, you can't unsee them. I think it cemented the notion of athletic dinosaurs. This is John Conway. He draws dinosaurs for a living. I'm a paleo artist, which means that I draw and paint prehistoric animals. Conway got interested in paleo art after reading Bob B Barker's book, The Dinosaur Heresies. And in the early part of his career, he drew dinosaurs that looked a lot like Barker's,

super lean and mussely. But after a while, he started to feel kind of funny about it. He says that all of his dinosaurs looked like they had been shrink-wrapped. You know, they suction, pack, you pack your clothes and you put the vacuum cleaner on it and you suck all the air out and it shrinks it down. That's sort of what we were doing with dinosaurs. We were sort of putting skin on them and then vacuuming out anything that was in between that skin and the muscles. Now paleoartis weren't just doing that to make their dinosaurs look all cool and buff.

They were trying to be accurate. I am part of the generation of paleoartis that grew up from a young age when we first started to think that it really mattered to get things right. And to get things right, you want your art to be rooted in real scientific evidence. And the main piece of evidence was often a skeleton. Paleoartists would base the shape of their dinosaurs on an accurate skeleton. The bones give you a pretty good idea where the muscles should go, but soft tissues like skin, and cartilage, and fat are much harder. Fat usually doesn't survive for millions of years in

fossils. And so, without any evidence of it, paleoartists tended to be pretty conservative about how much fat they gave their dinosaurs. Which makes total sense, you're not going to add something that you don't have evidence for. But the result was that all these dinosaurs looked like they went to the gym three times a day, and drank protein shakes for every meal. John Conway says it began to feel as though paleoartists had replaced one orthodoxy with another. At some point, I thought, you know, we can't just keep doing this. This is not interesting in many ways. And is it even right? Is this conservative approach really giving people the right notion about what dinosaurs looked like? Just because fat didn't survive for millions of years doesn't mean that a dinosaur didn't have it. They are animals after all.

So animals have fat and they have it all over the place and some places they have really big fat reserve, which changes their shape fairly drastically. To underscore this point, Conway asked me to consider a thought experiment. If we reconstructed modern animals, like we reconstruct dinosaurs, what would they look like? In other words, if some alien paleontologist from

millions of years in the future was to try and draw a modern animal, like say a whale or a camel, just from their fossilized skeleton, how would it look? Well, if you actually do it, the modern animals look ridiculous. If you draw a bowhead whale, for example, just from the skeleton, without a lot of fat or blubber, it looks kind of like a giant tadpole with a bulbous head and a long, snake-like tail. I mean, you take away all that stuff and you're not left with much whale, because whales, their shape is defined by fat.

Dinosaurs also had fat, and John argues that it would have changed their shape pretty dramatically. Who knows, some might have even had humps like camels. Yeah, you could take one of the most familiar dinosaurs. That dinosaur could have camel humps, and we wouldn't know. Right? Because you can't tell from a camel's back that it has humps. You just can't. There's not really anything there. Brontosaurus could have humps? We don't know. Now scientists do sometimes find dinosaur fossils with

the soft tissues intact, and when they do, they can completely change our image of the animal. The dinosaur Cetacosaurus, for example, used to be depicted in a standard shrink-wrapped kind of way. Until paleontologists found this amazing full-body fossil, where lots of the fat and the skin and the different soft tissues had been perfectly preserved. Turns out. The fleshy outline around the body was quite extensive. It was quite a chubby creature. There's striping all over the place, all over the body. And growing off the top of the tail, it's got like a hundred long curving quills.

They look kind of like floppy porcupine quills. And like you add all that together, that's a creature that's... we just would not predict that, based on just finding bones alone. In recent years, fossils have been found with fat and frills and thick coats of feathers. We more than anyone had predicted. So it turns out every time we discover something like this, it's weird. And that caught me thinking, so if all the ones we've discovered so far have turned out

to be pretty weird, what does that tell us about the rest of them? So John began to draw something new with his art. He started to speculate. He started drawing pudgy dinosaurs and dinosaurs with pumps and quills and weird skin flaps. And that was my rule. It was how far can we go? What's the most outrageous thing I can do that we don't know, isn't true, right? It's still within the realms of possibility. It's not falsify. John wasn't just making stuff up out of thin air. It was like there was a standard conservative dinosaur at the center of his drawings, and then Kameh would cover it with more speculative elements. It wasn't claiming that every drawing he did was perfectly accurate,

but he wanted to show people that dinosaurs as a group probably had a lot more weird variety than we think. And so, to get the overall picture of dinosaurs right, I think you need a healthy dose of speculation in there. Conway says that dinosaur art should always reflect the latest science, what we know for sure, but we'll never know everything. And I think the speculation is about

what extra bits of weird beauty were in the world back then. That we'll just never know about. The role of the artist is to bring back some of that real magic as a prehistoric world that was certainly there. John eventually decided to give the world some of that magic in the form of a book. He teamed up with Darren Nash and another paleo artist named Memo Cosmon and published a slim little paperback called All Yesterday's. All yesterday's is filled with dinosaurs that look very different from what you're used to. There's a triceratops that's covered in spines, a magungosaurus with skin that camouflages

it against the forest floor, and a pharaohzina-saurus that is so covered in feathers it looks like a haystack. And next to each image, the artist describes why they drew it that way. The camouflage dinosaur is drawn that way because the artist reason that its oddly proportioned body might have made it vulnerable to predators, and in need of some kind of defense strategy. All yesterdays was a big hit, and it helped spark a little movement for more speculative paleoart. We talk about the all yesterdays movement as like is the new frontier of the way we should

depict prehistoric animals. Daring Niche says it's more acceptable now to draw a dinosaur based on a hypothesis. For example, horned dinosaurs like triceratops have these absurdly large nostrils that have confused paleontologists for years. There have been a few different hypotheses but forward by scientists. And one of them is that the dinosaurs may have had inflatable nose balloons. Kind of like elephant seal or hooded seal inflatable pouches, but just would have looked weird and grotesque and utterly alien to us, but that's a very real possibility.

Now, 20 years ago, if someone were to draw at Triceratops with nose balloons, they would have been laughed at. But I would say that what we call the all yesterday's movement means that it is now quite reasonable for an artist to say, I've shown my Triceratops with giant inflatable nose balloons for this reason. And you could say, no, don't do it, that's too speculative, that it would be equally justifiable to say, okay, for the time being, that's okay. That doesn't mean triceratops definitely had nose balloons.

But by drawing it that way, it's like the artist is asking us to keep an open mind. Because even though we know a lot about the prehistoric world, and more and more every day, the science is always changing. The past is always a moving target. Piliwart is not just about drawing dinosaurs with stripes and nose balloons. Illustrators also depict dinosaur behavior, which may have even a greater impact on how we imagine extinct animals. More on that, after this.

Hello, this is Emmett, back with Roman in the studio to talk a little bit more about Paleoart. Hi, Roman. In this piece, we focused a lot on dinosaur appearance, like the look of their physical bodies, but there's like a, now they're pretty important issue with this, which is dinosaur behavior. Like if you're going to draw a dinosaur, you're going to draw it. It's doing something. Doing something, right? Right.

And so like when you think of like dinosaur art, what are the dinosaurs usually doing? Usually the T-Rex is tearing something apart. Usually the, at least when I was a kid, the Brontosaurus, as we mentioned, was staining a swamp with leaves sort of hanging out of its mouth. Right, like if it's like a meeting dinosaur, it's probably eating another dinosaur, or attacking another dinosaur. If it's a plant eating dinosaur,

it's probably being attacked, or like running away in some kind of way. Or eating a plant. I mean, it sort of seems to be like whatever you ate as a dinosaur is what you should be depicted doing at any moment of its being depicted in form of art. Which like, you know, I mean, in some ways,

it's not just a dinosaur thing. Like if you think about nature documentaries, we like to depict action. Totally. Like one was the last time you saw a cheetah doing anything other than running down a gazelle and like biting its throat. Right.

But like cheetahs do a lot of other things. Sure. They have a complex life. A whole life. And that's like a real point though with art for people like Darren and John who are in our piece is like they think the lives of a lot of animals, including dinosaurs are a lot less action packed than it feels like when you are just looking at the art.

They're not opening their mouths and roaring at the camera all the time. They're not just killing and fighting. They're doing things that living animals do. They're like, you know, moving around and sleeping and finding food and being boring all the time. And you mentioned this earlier, but like I feel like of all the dinosaurs that we don't associate with that kind of boring activity, like Tyrannosaurus Rex, ranks pretty high. Of all the ones we associate with action and violence, it's T-Rex. Absolutely. It's always chomping at something.

That's its role. Even the end of Jurassic Park, its role is to end the movie by Chomping a dinosaur in it. Right, right. And so when Darren and John were writing the book all yesterday, they obviously wanted to put a Tyrannosaurus in there. And John based his T-Rex painting on this one skeleton, this kind of famous skeleton

that scientists have nicknamed Stan. Stan is quite an aggressive looking tyrannosaurus in a way. It's got quite a large, long, scary looking head. And so Stan is traditionally depicted doing very nasty things to other animals. But John is also pretty adamant like that's not the whole truth of who this creature was. They're probably going to kill something

once every two weeks. They spent the vast majority of their life asleep probably with a great big full belly just sleeping on the ground. And so that's how I painted it. So do you have that picture in the book? Yeah, yeah. So here's the book. Oh, you look so peaceful. Yeah, it's almost like a cute image. It's very cute. Yeah, just slightly crawled up with its little tiny T-Rex arms up by its chin. This is one of John's favorite pieces from all yesterday's and he calls it a sleepy stan. Well, in fact, I mean, this picture, it doesn't even show his teeth when it's sleeping.

Yeah. Which I don't think I've ever seen a T-Rex picture without it bearing its teeth Right, which is a stunning to think about that I've never and I but I now as I see it I know it's true I've never seen one without its teeth being being being shown and how long they are and Probably ripping into flesh, but yeah, we just we don't show Tell me in a story. I just Relaxing and that's what they did most of the time. Right.

There's probably pretty good life. Sleepy Stan. Sleepy Stan. Curled up. That's awesome. So if you flip Roman to like the back of the book, there's one more thing that I want to show you. So this back section of the book is actually called All Todays. And the idea behind this part of the book is it's sort of the actualization of that thought experiment that John Conway asked us to do, where you know you're imagining an alien paleontologist from the future who is trying to piece together what the contemporary world, the animals of the contemporary world, look like based on fossil evidence.

Right. So this picture I'm looking at now is a manatee, but it's a land, a grazing land, herbivore. Right, can you read the description they have there? It says, a solitary manatee is shown grazing in its mountain home. We only know the skull of this enigmatic herbivore. So basically, like in this case, they're saying, like, so with this animal, maybe we only, the only thing we ever got was the skull. And so, like, from that, you're trying to make, you're like, oh, this looks a little bit like a cow skull. And it's totally common in dinosaurs, that they only find one little section. It's very rare that we find full skeletons to tell you everything about them. But, you know, we told

that you could pick up a manatee skull and show enough, you would think that's a cow. And even if you do find a full skeleton, there are other things that you could still miss. Totally. Oh, and this elephant, you wouldn't have a trunk to as evidence of this elephant, it's just this snub-nosed, weird-looking thing. Oh my God, oh, that's so true. Right, so like a camel, the same way that we don't,

and that's that we wouldn't necessarily know that a camel had a had-humps, you wouldn't know that an elephant had trunk, had a trunk which is like such an iconic, weird piece of anatomy in the world. It's the thing that you define an elephant by, but it's not there and therefore, it doesn't look at all like an elephant

and it just looks absurd. I really like it. It really sells it, especially with these speculative imaginings of modern animals, really sells the idea of it a lot. Right, and they go, I like their text on some of these, so if you read the swans, yeah, say two swans are seen with their long, sith-like forelimbs, which they must have used to spear small prey items.

One of them has just caught a tadpole, one of the mysterious fish of the past. Oh, it's so perfect. Right, so they really embody this futuristic scientist who's trying to piece together the world that we currently live in now and is making these kind of conceptual leaps from evidence to painting a real picture of what the world actually looked like. Yeah, but there's still everyone's doing their best. It's not like making fun of them. It really is. It just has to, with the limited information we have,

this is what we create. Right. And it really shows the limits of that information. Oh, it's so cool. It's such a good idea to think this way. It dislodges the iconography from your mind to be free. Exactly. You have to think about them in lots of ways. And that's really, and it really sells it when you see a modern animal depicted in the Swarche traditional dinosaur way. I kind of love that aspect of it. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Emmett Fitzgerald, Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer Kurt Colstead, is the digital director.

The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffleman, Taren Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced, on Radio Robe. In beautiful, downtown downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find mall at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too.

But if you're thinking, I need more 99PI in my life, or we have all the old episodes available in new articles about design every couple of days on our beautiful, beautiful website. It's 99p i dot org Radio tapio From PRX you