Instant Genius - How paleoartists bring dinosaurs to life

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

From the terrifying, hulking beasts portrayed in blockbuster movies to the friendly, charismatic characters often found in children’s cartoons, dinosaurs have made their way into almost every corner of popular culture. However, in terms of scientific accuracy, such depictions tend to leave a lot to be desired. So, how do we know what dinosaurs really looked like, whose job is it to show us, and how exactly do they go about it? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Mark Witton, a researcher, author and highly regarded paleoartist based at the University of Portsmouth. He outlines the detailed scientific process paleoartists follow to bring these ancient beasts to life as realistically as possible, runs us through some of the common mistakes Hollywood directors make in the name of artistic licence, and explains why the T.Rex is one of his favourite dinosaurs to draw. To see Mark’s work, check out his website www.markwitton.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. From the terrifying, hulking beasts portrayed in blockbuster movies to the friendly, charismatic characters often found in children's cartoons. dinosaurs have made their way into almost every corner of popular culture. However, in terms of scientific accuracy, such depictions tend to leave a lot to be desired. So how do we know what dinosaurs really look like?

Whose job is it to show us? And how exactly do they go about it? In this episode, we're joined by Dr Mark Whitten, a researcher, author and highly regarded paleo artist based at the University of Plymouth. He outlines the detailed scientific process paleo artists following, to bring these ancient beasts to life as realistically as possible. Runs us through some of the common mistakes Hollywood directors make in the name of artistic licence and explains why the T-Rex is one of his favourite dinosaurs to draw.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, no problem. It's great to be back. So today we're talking all about paleo art. So I bet pretty much everyone has seen depictions of dinosaurs in some form or another. But when did the discipline of paleoart get started? Is it more of a modern thing, or has it been around essentially since we first discovered dinosaur fossils? Yeah, so paleoart is a very, very old discipline. It's basically as old as the science of paleontology itself.

So we're talking about sort of 1800 is one of the oldest bits of paleo art that we have. I think we should really define what we mean by paleo art, though, because people have been putting images based on fossils together for, for hundreds, if not thousands of years, there are sites you can go to in the world where people have interpreted dinosaur footprints as the evidence of giant birds. There are some myths, not all myths, but there are some myths that probably have some basis in fossil animals and fossil plants. And so there's been this long history of people interpreting fossils in artwork. But what changes in the early 19th century is that we now have a science to put

these things together with. And we're not thinking about finding ammonites and interpreting them as snakes or finding the bones of a mammoth and interpreting that as the remains of a giant, we're now thinking about these things in the context of these are the remains of specific animals. So when we're finding dinosaur remains, we're interpreting them as the remains of giant reptiles and not as the remains of something else. The difference between what we do as paleo artists and what people were doing before the 1800s is that we're bringing. science into creating our artwork of these extinct animals, extinct plants, extinct landscapes. So this isn't an exercise in fantasy. This isn't us just going, looking at a bone and going,

I will just imagine an animal based on that. It's us following a scientific process of what kind of animal is that. What sort of fossil evidence do we have about its size, its proportions, and other parts of its anatomy? So there's a huge scientific component to what we call paleo art. Yeah, so let's have a look at that a bit more closely then. starting point for the paleo artwork is going through the fossil records. So the sort of first question then is something I find really fascinating is how do paleontologists piece together fossils to give us a complete sort of picture as complete a picture of the dinosaur as possible? Really depends on what sort of fossil you find. Sometimes you'll find a completely articulated skeleton of an extinct animal,

every bones in place. Sometimes you even have, typically fossils are the hard parts of organisms so that are the bits that are going to preserve well. You have to imagine

that everything that enters the fossil record starts out life as a rotting corpse somewhere and what we call the soft parts of animal bodies tend to rot down far quicker

than those of their the bony parts, the hard parts. So that's what we tend to get in the fossil record. We don't get very often we don't get the things like muscle

and skin because they tend to be eaten away by animals or they just to get rotted down by, you know, decaying microbes. But what's much more difficult to get rid of are things like bones and shells. So sometimes that can enter the fossil record in a very complete state and will have an entire skeleton, in which case there's not much for the paleontologists to do. You've kind of got everything. In some cases, you can almost just draw around that, you know, to give you an idea of what that animal may have looked like when it was a little body lying on the forest floor. Other times, of course, of course fossils are far less complete.

And we have to look at other close relatives. We'll look at something and say, okay, we understand that this animal is this type of dinosaur. And let's bring in some bones from some other dinosaurs that are closely related and will enable us to complete the picture of the skeleton of this animal. Once you then have that complete skeleton, you have to start building up the other tissues that are missing.

So it'll be a case of thinking, where does the muscle go? Where do the muscles attach to the different bones? And again, this is something that we have a pretty good idea about because we have living animals today that we can use to understand muscle distribution in different types of animals. So if you want to understand where muscles go in a dinosaur, you'd look at living dinosaurs, i.e. birds.

And you also have a look at crocodiles, crocodiles, crocodilians, I should say, are the cousins of dinosaurs. And so dinosaur musculature, when we're thinking about non-bird dinosaurs, things like Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus and so on, their muscle system is going to be somewhere between that of a crocodile and that of a bird. And so we use, again, a science-based approach to put in those muscles together.

We'll then use anything else we can find in the fossil record to give us any insight into life appearance. So this might be traces of skin or feathers. We've got many dinosaurs now that have got traces of different kinds of feather, all sorts of different types. Some are quite hair-like. Some are the kind of complex vein feathers. that we have in living birds. Obviously, we have plenty of dinosaurs that have scales as well.

So, yeah, there's all sorts of data that we can take from the fossil record and put into our reconstructions. Yeah, so let's say we've got, you know, as you say, they're one of these great sort of extant fossil samples to start from. So what's the next step for you as somebody who's going to depict the dinosaur, you know, do you take reference photographs, measurements of the bones, 3D scans, things like that? Yeah, you really use as much data as you. you can. One thing that maybe people don't appreciate, I think about when you see a scientifically informed picture of an extinct animal is how much research has gone into that. It's really a case of how much information can I get from. Sometimes if you're working with a paleontologist,

they will send you as much information as they have about the subject that they want illustrated. So they might send you all the measurements of the bones. Nowadays, of course, there's lots of 3D scanning that happens with fossils. And so they might send you the 3D files and you might manipulate those yourself, you might 3D print them for reference purposes, you will also start looking at as much soft tissue information as you can. So if there's any soft tissue data about the fossil organism, that will also be provided. But you also will go on, have a look at living animals for what's a good analog for the thing that you're reconstructing. So if you're looking at a dinosaur, for instance, one good thing to go and look at for the musculature, and this might

sound a little bit left field because these animals are quite different in shape. And when we're talking about dinosaurs now, we tend to talk about a lot about birds. But if you want to understand the hind limb musculature, for instance, of a dinosaur, a good thing to go and look at are some lizards and crocodilians. The reason for that is that birds obviously have a very different hind limb apparatus to a dinosaur because they've lost their tail. But in lizards and crocs, they still have that big, long tail. there's a muscle, it's a couple of muscles on the side of those tails, which actually anchored to the hind limb.

There's a big retractor muscle that anchors all the way down the tail of a lizard and a crocodile. And they really bulge the side of the tail out. So if we're looking to reconstruct a non-avian dinosaur with one of these big tails for it, we need to go and have a look at a modern analogue. So give us an idea of what the bulk of that tail musculature may have been like. Yeah, so I think another, since I've been covering science as a journalist for blimey for almost 20 years now, during that time, we seem to have discovered more and more about the colour of dinosaurs, you know, so how do we know that?

This is really fascinating because this is an area of a very active research, you know, as we're talking now. Color can amazingly be preserved in fossils. I mean, we're talking, you know, when we're talking about fossils, as we've already said, We're mostly thinking about shells and skeletons. And for a lot of the case, you just think, well, color is made by pigments. It's made by surface structures on animal skin and hair and feathers and things that can scatter light in certain ways.

These are structures, pigments and structural color, very, very sensitive to decay and they disappear rapidly. I mean, if you go to a museum, go to the Natural History Museum, and you'll see some old taxidermies, and a lot of them are looking quite faded, and that's because the pigments degrade very rapidly over time. So if an animal isn't constantly replacing them, they disappear. And the same is very true for fossils.

You know, we lose all that pigment data in 99.9% of cases. However, every now and then, some of this information does come through. And what we're quite good at is detecting patterns in extinct organisms. Sometimes we're very good at reconstructing actual colours. And we can say the fact that, you know, that is the color that extinct organism was. So there are some, one of my favorite examples, just because it's so unexpected, is there are some reefs that existed in the Jurassic. So we're talking maybe about 150 million years ago or so. There would have been reefs that were completely pink. And we know that because we found these

ancient algae and you cut them open and they still have this sort of reddy pink pigment on the inside. It's amazing to look at. And it's just completely preserved as it is. I particularly like that example because we tend to think of deep time and the age of reptiles and thing is this ferocious, you know, an awful time with animals constantly fighting and being violent to one another. And actually, no, there's big pink reefs everywhere. You know, completely unexpected. So sometimes we find that the pigments as they're preserved. In other instances, we find moulds and traces of pigments. And now pigment science is very complicated, but to break it down into a very simple, you know, very simple analogy, we can use the shape of the pigment

cells are all different. So if you've got black pigment in some parts of your body, that might have a pigment cell of one shape. And if you've got a paler pigment, another part of your body, it might have a pigment cell of another shape. So there's one idea that we can use these different shapes of fossil pigment to get an idea of where one part of the body was dark and where another part of it was pale. This needs to be verified, however, with what we call geochemistry. So it's looking at the chemical remains of these pigments and to make sure, because pigments are very complicated. In some groups, the long ones mean that something's black. In another groups, it will mean the long one is much paler colour. So we use the geochemistry to verify the pigment deductions that we make

based on shape. It all gets a little bit complicated. But the bottom line is that we have got some insights now into some aspects of colour for a range of extinct animals, not just for for dinosaurs, but for all sorts of extinct organisms, going right the way back to fish and amphibians through dinosaurs and up to various different types of mammals. And I mean, there's a whole conversation to be had about reconstructing extinct colour, because it isn't always just about the fossils themselves. You can also look at ancient cave art. This is something that ancient people were painting animals that are now extinct.

You know, to them living tens of thousands of years ago, these animals were still alive. but of course to us they're now extinct. But in some parts of the world, so particularly Europe, many of those ancient artists, we think were recording accurately details of pattern and coloration. So we can use that as a source of color. So to bring color to our reconstructions,

it isn't just a case of looking at fossils. It's really looking at all sorts of evidence and trying to factor all of that into what we do. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, Use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills,

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name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Let's move on to look a bit into your process as an artist, I guess you'd call it. So first off, I'd encourage people to check out your work on your website, markwitten.com. It's really stunning stuff. But, you know, how do you get started?

So we've mentioned there the proportions. So how do you ensure you get the proportions correct, you know, when you're starting? Do you use, for example, a sort of grid system or you're now so experienced and skilled that you can essentially do it by eye? So everyone's a little bit different. I think the way you do this well when you've got the time and resources to really do your painting with the best method is you start by reconstructing the skeleton. You sort of outline where all the major bones are going to go. And if you've got the time to do it, the best thing to do is before you start working on your final piece, as it were, you'll actually do plenty of rough sketches of this. So you really get a handle on what this thing looks like.

Our job as a paleo artist is to become as familiar with what we think our subject looked like as you could be if you were going out and sketching birds in your garden. The idea is that we understand it in three dimensions and that we can then take that understanding into our artwork. And so we can position this animal that no longer exists in any pose that we think is appropriate and be able to draw it in a way where we have an accurate conveyance of its three dimensional anatomy. And that can, of course, be complicated because when you're drawing something in 3D, you can't just measure all the bones because you have the influence of perspective and force-shortening and these sort of problems. So you have to be able to a certain extent to eyeball it. What you can also do, again, if you've got the time, is you could make a 3D model of your

subject either in, you know, traditionally you'd be using things like clay. Nowadays, of course, you can model things in 3D using various computer packages. And that can also be a very good way of getting the proportions correct. So yeah, there's lots of ways of understanding the basic foundation of your subject species, and then you can take that into your reconstruction. Right. So where do you get most of your work from? Is it from, you know, mostly academic institutions, or do other people doing, you know, different things,

you know, sort of more stuff in the public domain come to you for commissions? So, yeah, there's a lot of work that comes as you'd expect from people who are researching extinct life. So you get contacted by paleontologists who will ask, can you draw me this thing? We've got a new species. Can you draw this new species for us? You'll get contacted by a museum, say, maybe they're renovating their halls or they're putting a new exhibit together and they need some artwork for it. A lot of work comes from that route. I also work as an author, and so a lot of the paleo art that I produce is for my own books. So that'll be, I'll have a list of things I need to illustrate for a book, and I'll just work my way through them when I'm writing

the book or I'll come up with an idea when I'm writing a section and think that'll make for a good painting and I'll go away and do that. There is a little bit of interest from the private sector. There are people who are really into paleo art and so they will commission artwork or they will buy artwork or buy prints from you. And the other main component of this is you get work from people making dinosaur documentaries. Ever since walking with dinosaurs back in 1999, there's been a big push for lots of CG dinosaurs, lots of CG prehistoric animals in dinosaur documentaries. The way I remember growing up as a child of the 1980s,

when I was growing up, dinosaur documentaries were very much, here's a talking head and we're going to have a look at a fossil, and then maybe you'd get a few minutes of animation because it was a lot more expensive to do back then. Ever since walking with dinosaurs, that's swapped around, and we get a lot more animation, a lot more digital recreation of extinct worlds than we used to get. So, of course, there's now a need to design these animals and to animate them.

And so as a paleo artist, it's not uncommon to get contacted by documentary makers to say, can you help us design this? Can you give us a colour scheme for that? So, yeah, you get work from a number of different sources doing this. That sounds like great fun. Oh, it is. It's really, when someone says, you know, can you, it's always nice. when you're a paleo artist to do new things.

But every now and then a documentary team will say, can you design as a stegosaurus? And the little five-year-old in size, you just go, yeah, stegosaurus, that's great. That's a fantastic dinosaur to be working on. So, yeah, it's, I mean, this is a, if you never grew up, which I guess I never did, if you never grew up,

and you're just always drawing dinosaurs as a small person. And then someone said, we'd like to pay you to draw, draw us a diplodicus or draw us a T-Rex. It's like, yep, this is my dream job from when I was five years old. Yeah, so sort of sticking with the art site, what materials do you personally use to create your artworks?

So mine's exclusively digital, and this is something that I think is increasingly common with paleo artists, because we're typically working with people maybe across the other side of the world. You know, be a museum in North America who says, can you do as an illustration? And of course, to do that traditionally,

I mean, it's certainly very doable, but it all involves a lot of, you know, for delivering the artwork, whereas digitally, you can be working on your computer and then you send it across to someone, and they see exactly what it's meant to look like. There's no complications with photography or sort of trying to capture the image to send over to them. With digital, you can just send it over via email. And of course, when you're doing things like murals, often that's now digitally printed anyway. It's printed from a digital file. So it's increasingly common to work digitally. As a science-based discipline, the other advantage of digital artwork is that when a new study comes out that advances the science, it means that the reconstruction is no longer current, you can go back to that painting, and it's very easy to modify. Whereas if you've done something in acrylics or oil paint, you certainly can modify it, but it's much, much more work. Whereas with a digital painting, I've done this, I've gone back to things that I've done 10, 15 years ago in some cases, and I sort of brought them

up to date. I mean, obviously at some point you might think, okay, well, it's probably easier just to start again, but it's nice to have that ability to just go back and tweak things here and there to make them current. Or if someone says that we'd like to use a painting, you know, if you get maybe licensed to use a painting and you think, well, that picture is 99% current, but there's just one or two little things in there that I'd like to tweak and you can just go in there and make those changes and then it's, you know, then you can license it. So yeah, there's lots of advantages to work in digitally if you're a paleo artist. Yeah, so this might be a bit of a sort of how long's a piece of string question. But how long does it typically take for you to complete one of these works?

Really depends what people want. This is very much about the complexity of the image, the size of the image. I mean, if you're talking about murals, you know, big museum murals, you're measuring that in, in weeks, you know, how many weeks are you going to spend on this thing? If someone just wants a simple sketch of, let's just say an animal, you know, just on a plain white background, they just want to know what the very basic appearance of the animal is and it doesn't have to be the most detailed reconstruction in the world, you know, maybe it's an afternoon. So it really is very dependent on what people want and, you know, how it has to be displayed. But another factor in this is also just how much we know about that extinct organism. So if someone says, can you

draw me a Tyrannosaurus? Well, Tyrannosaurus is an animal that we have tons and tons of reference material for. So I don't have to go away and research Trinosaurus because I know, you know, where everything is in terms of the reference I would need to access, I know where it all is. If someone says, can you draw me this incredibly obscure thing from, you know, a geological formation that no one really has ever heard of, then we're going to have to spend an afternoon just trying to learn everything I can about that subject. So that's also another factor, is trying to learn, you know, what we need to know about the subject before we can actually get to the painting process. Yeah, so you mentioned there the sort of, you know, sometimes these

works are kind of portraits, if you could call it that. But a lot of your work isn't just sort of depictions of dinosaurs standing still. You know, they're doing something, you know, they're dynamic depictions. So how do we figure out how the dinosaurs behaved that can feed into this, you know, and how do you choose what sort of behaviour that you'd like to depict? Yeah, this is an interesting question because it could go off in lots of different ways. I mean, we fundamentally know that that extinct organisms are going to be behaving pretty similar to how modern organisms do. So they're going to be worried about finding food, keeping themselves warm, they're going to be worried about reproducing.

There's going to be aspects of territoriality. All of the stuff that we know of from living animals is going to also be present in the past. And obviously we sometimes pick up fossil evidence of that. So we can find cases where carnivores have bitten down on the bones of their prey and they've left either their teeth or they've left teeth gouges, where they've been feeding on certain types of other organisms. We find evidence of herbivory through things like coprolites, which are fossil feces.

You can find what plants, herbivores have been eating because they haven't digested them fully and they've been preserved in the fossil record in that way. So there's tons and tons of ways that we can get evidence of behavior preserved in the fossil record. That's a really good inspiration for us as artists to be able to say, we're now drawing something that we know must have happened.

We may not know exactly how it all came. together, but we've got a pretty good idea that at least that occurred. But obviously we can also look at living animals to give us an idea of, well, what else do animals do, which isn't going to be evidenced in the fossil record? So we're talking about things like sleeping or preening, dust bathing, these sort of behaviours that we're not necessarily going to find evidence of in the geological record, but we know must have taken place in deep time. And there's a push, I think, among modern paleo artists to really try and explore some of these behaviours to get away from, a lot of paleo art is about animal confrontations.

It's about predators and prey and animals fighting one another. And sure, we know that that happens and we know that there's lots of exciting stuff to do with that artistically. But there's a lot to be said for painting extinct animals, doing other things as well. And it casts them in a very different light. And there's a whole conversation here to be had about the culture of paleontology

and how we imagine deep time. I think we tend to assume that deep time is a lot more sort of violent and monstrous than life is today. But really, I don't think there's any real evidence to suggest that that was the case. And if we draw a T-Rex fighting a T-Seratops and that kind of plays up to its idea of it being this big monster, if we draw a T-Rex scratching its face or sleeping, then that casts this animal in a very different light. And I think that's something that we are trying to explore and through artwork now is to think about extinct organisms as fully rounded, you know, real animals, real plants, real individuals, rather than just seeing them as, you know, sort of mythological beasts that are constantly fighting one another. Yeah, so we've talked a lot about the kind of the importance that people such as yourselves, like proper professionals, place on accuracy. But not every depiction of dinosaurs follows that path.

So what are some of the most common mistakes you see in depictions of dinosaurs? Yeah, I mean, this is something that for us as paleo artists, it can be quite frustrating to see the more popular end of, some people wouldn't even call this paleo art. He might be called paleo illustration. So it's sort of illustration that has got a paleontological component to it, but it's not really trying to be scientifically accurate. This is actually the most common way that people see dinosaurs.

We don't see true paleo art put on the side of buses to advertise a Jurassic Park film. What we see is a Hollywood-eyes, popularized version of a dinosaur. To us as paleo artists, those depictions of extinct animals aren't really true depictions of it. If you take the stripes off a tiger, is it still a tiger? And I think most people would say, well, no, it's not. So if you take the feathers off a velociraptor, is it still a velociraptor? I mean, we know for fact that Velociraptor had feathers. We've got what we call quill knobs,

which are the little anchor sites where feathers of the wing anchor onto a bone of the forearm. And we have those preserved in velociraptors, so we know for the fact that Velociraptor had feathers. And yet, you think about all the Jurassic Park films, none of the velociraptors have feathers. They've got some species in there, which aren't Velociraptor which have feathers,

but we've never seen a feathered velociraptor in Jurassic Park. And so is that, therefore, a depiction? of Velociraptor, I would argue that it's not, in the same reason a stripless tiger, isn't a true tiger. There's this sort of tension between what some parties want to do with dinosaurs, or we could even put air quotes and say, what they want to do with dinosaurs, because if they're not restoring them accurately, are they even depictions of dinosaurs anymore? There's this tension between what they want to do with dinosaurs and what science wants to do with dinosaurs. And so what this equates to is that we have a version of dinosaurs running around that just don't really have any

real bearing on what the fossil record tells us. So things like lack of feathers is a very common one. We know that lots of predatory dinosaurs had feathers of various kinds. And this goes from things like Velociraptor up to things like Tyrannosaurus. We don't know exactly what the skin of Tyrannosaurus was like. We've got evidence of scales in T-Rex, but it's part of a group that definitely had the capacity to have feathers of some kind. So it's part of, there are other Tyrannosaurids, so are you animals closely related to T-Rex on the same branch of evolution as T-Rex, and plenty of them have got feathers, you know, like decent amounts of feathers that would make, you'd look at them and go, they look fluffy. So what does that mean for T-Rex? Well, it probably

means that there's definitely the potential to have some feathers on that animal somewhere. There's a very common way of depicting Trianosaurus is to not give it any sort of lips, and so you can see all of the teeth. There is really, really, really good evidence for lips in predatory dinosaurs. But I think there's a certain contingent of people who think they look more ferocious if their teeth are exposed. But no, we've got all the evidence points

to lips covering their teeth. So you need to, when you imagine a dinosaur face, you need to think more like the face of a lizard where you can't see the teeth, where everything is fully closed in. You need to think more like a lizard than you do a crocodile. And there's lots of other issues as well.

Things like the eye sizes, when you think about how large dinosaur eyes are depicted in physical, They tend to be very big, so they make for more expressive creatures. You can predict the size of an animal's eye through a little bone that actually occurs around the front of the eyes. The little doughnuts of bone that occurs around the eye. In most things, we're weird for not having one. So mammals are strange for lacking this little donut of bone.

But that little don't know the solaritic ring, so I don't have to keep saying bone donut. That sclerotic ring gives us a rough idea of how large the visible eye would have been. And we have these for dinosaurs, so we have a pretty good idea of how big their eyes were. and their eyes were large, but of course the animals in many cases were huge. And so relative to the size of the animal, the eye doesn't look all that big. But in Hollywood versions of dinosaurs, they always got these giant eyes, like these big kind of beach balls in the side of their heads so that we can see them and react to them more and engage with them more as an audience. But the reality of it is that in many cases, their eyes are probably far too big. And we could be here all day talking about things that are, you know, the dichotomy between the popularized version,

of dinosaurs and the scientific reality of them. But yeah, they're my three big ones, I'd say, is the feathers, the lips, and the eye sizes. So let's finish up with a couple of fun questions then. So you mentioned earlier there, the Stegosaurus, like the childhood you drawing a Stegosaurus. But do you have any particular favourite dinosaurs to draw? I do. And I think one of the nice things about my job is I never know what I'm going to get asked to do. And so whenever I get tasked to do something new that I've never done.

before. I always particularly enjoyed that just because it's something new and I get to learn a bunch of stuff. At the same time, you do have these animals which are particularly fun to go back to. So giant terrorsors, giant flying reptiles. My PhD was involved in studying them. So I have a particular soft spot for reconstructing them. Also, and this is incredibly cliche, I did a book recently all about Tyrannosaurus. There's a huge book, sort of 150 illustrations of it. And I got a little bit bored of T-Rex before then, but being able to drill. into the anatomy of that animal and try and reconstruct it. I had a whole, there's sort of a big chunk of the book about the life appearance of T-Rex

and being able to reconstruct that animal in as much detail as I could and to be able to say, I think this is what the science points to as being our best version of T-Rex at the minute. That was a lot of fun. And plus, it's nice to be able to say, oh, you know, I like, I have the appreciation for these obscure small little animals. But being able to draw giant dinosaurs smacking into one another is incredibly fun. And so if you're looking at T-Rex and you do have an excuse to draw very large animals doing awesome things to one another. So yeah, T-Rex has definitely become a bit of a favourite. My final one has to be the long-neck dinosaurs just because they're such a bizarre shape

and they're so pleasing to draw. They've got these long sweeping curves. You can do all sorts of wonderful stuff with their necks. And I tend to look at geese a lot for the is geese and swans, just because they're long-necked dinosaurs that we have around today. So I look at their neck postures. And in the back of my head, you know, if they go out birdwatching or whatever, and I'm looking at geese and swans, I'm looking at what they are doing with their necks. And I'm thinking, okay, I want to try and put that into a picture of one of them, a long-necked dinosaur picture at some point.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Mark Whitten. To discover more about what we've just discussed, check out Mark's website, markwitten.co.uk. Or grab a copy of his book, the paleo artist's handbook. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

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