Welcome to my first blog post! Everyone loves dinosaurs, right? So what better way to start off than with some dinosaur art!
Lambeosaurus
Actually, I have a confession: I think I have only drawn two dinosaurs since I started studying paleontology. One is a Lambeosaurus portrait based on work from James Gurney’s Dinotopia books, and the other is a triceratops skull based on illustrations from Roemer’s classic vertebrate paleontology text. “But you’re a paleoartist!” you may say. “Of course you must draw dinosaurs! DINOSAURS ARE PALEONTOLOGY and PALEONTOLOGY IS DINOSAURS!” Although that statement is widely believed by the general public, it is, like many things believed by the general public, false. Although paleontology includes dinosaurs and dinosaurs are included in paleontology, the vast majority of dead things in the fossil record are not dinosaurs.
Don’t get me wrong – dinosaurs are incredibly cool and absolutely worth studying. But unlike many paleontologists, I didn’t go into this field because of a life-long interest in dinosaurs or because I knew the names of dozens of dinosaur genera by the age of six. The real reason I study paleontology is because of my interest in evolutionary biology. I started off as a biologist and was lured into paleontology by -don’t laugh- the temptation of working on fossil sponges (they really are absorbing). Once I got started thinking about paleontology, I was hooked. Paleontology is evolutionary biology with the perspective of geologic time, with hundreds of millions of years of history preserved in the rock record to explore and try to understand. It is the study of how long-extinct organisms interacted with their environment, of how the past is responsible for modern biodiversity, of how the Earth as we know it has been shaped by life (and vice versa), and of the processes responsible for the patterns we observe in the fossil record and living organisms.
Triceratops in the style of Romer
There are so many exciting and inspiring things about the history of Earth and the history of life. Although dinosaurs are incredibly cool, most of what I’ll be posting on this site won’t be about dinosaurs because there are countless other life forms, past and present, that deserve to be studied, understood, and illustrated. Many may be considered less charismatic than dinosaurs, but if you take the time to study and understand them, an amazing view of life will open up to you.
And sponges deserve some love, too!
Alpenglow Studios 