"Proto-paleoart" (pre-1800) While the word "paleoart" is relatively recent, the practice of restoring ancient life based on real fossil remains can be considered to have originated around the same time as paleontology. However, art of extinct animals has existed long before
Henry De la Beche's 1830 painting
Duria Antiquior, which is sometimes credited as the first true paleontological artwork. These older works include sketches, paintings and detailed anatomical restorations, though the relation of these works to observed fossil material is mostly speculative. For example, a
Corinthian vase painted sometime between 560 and 540
BCE is thought by some researchers to bear a depiction of an observed fossil skull. This so-called "Monster of Troy", the beast fought by the
mythological Greek hero
Heracles, somewhat resembles the skull of the
giraffid Samotherium. Witton considered that because the painting has significant differences from the skull it is supposedly representing (lack of horns, sharp teeth), it should not necessarily be considered "proto-paleoart". Other scholars have suggested that ancient fossils inspired
Grecian depictions of
griffins, with the mythical chimera of lion and bird anatomy superficially resembling the beak, horns and quadrupedal body plan of the dinosaur
Protoceratops. Similarly, authors have speculated that the huge, unified nasal opening in the skull of fossil mammoths could have inspired ancient artwork and stories of the one-eyed
cyclops. However, these ideas have never been adequately substantiated, with existing evidence more parsimonious with established cultural interpretations of these mythical figures. The earliest definitive works of "proto-paleoart" that unambiguously depict the life appearance of fossil animals come from fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. One such depiction is Ulrich Vogelsang's statue of a
Lindwurm in
Klagenfurt,
Austria that dates to 1590. Writings from the time of its creation specifically identify the skull of
Coelodonta antiquitatis, the woolly rhinoceros, as the basis for the head in the restoration. This skull had been found in a mine or gravel pit near Klagenfurt in 1335, and remains on display today. Despite its poor resemblance of the skull in question, the Lindwurm statue was thought to be almost certainly inspired by the find. Eighteenth century skeletal reconstructions of the
unicorn are thought to have been inspired by
Ice Age mammoth and rhinoceros bones found in a cave near
Quedlinburg, Germany in 1663. These artworks are of uncertain origin and may have been created by
Otto von Guericke, the German naturalist who first described the "unicorn" remains in his writings, or
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the author who published the image posthumously in 1749. This rendering represents the oldest known illustration of a fossil skeleton.
Early scientific paleoart (1800–1890) 's 1800 restoration of the
pterosaur Pterodactylus antiquus The beginning of the 19th century saw the first paleontological artworks with an unambiguous scientific basis, and this emergence coincided with paleontology being seen as a distinct field of science. The French naturalist and professor
Jean Hermann of
Strasbourg, France, drafted what Witton describes as the "oldest known, incontrovertible" pieces of paleoart in 1800. These sketches, based on the first known fossil skeleton of a pterosaur, depict Hermann's interpretation of the animal as a flying mammal with fur and large external ears. These ink drawings were relatively quick sketches accompanying his notes on the fossil and were likely never intended for publication, and their existence was only recently uncovered from correspondence between the artist and the French anatomist
Baron Georges Cuvier. , based on frozen carcass he observed in Siberia Similarly, private sketches of mammoth fossils drafted by
Yakutsk merchant Roman Boltunov in 1805 were likely never intended for scientific publication, but their function—to communicate the life appearance of an animal whose tusks he had found in Siberia and was hoping to sell—nevertheless establishes it one of the first examples of paleoart by today's definition. Boltunov's sketches of the animal, which depicted it without a
trunk and
boar-like, raised enough scientific interest in the specimen that the drawings were later sent to
St. Petersburg and eventually led to excavation and study of the rest of the specimen. 's 1822 cartoon of
William Buckland in a hyena den, intended to honor Buckland's groundbreaking analysis of fossils found at
Kirkdale cave Cuvier went on to produce skeletal restorations of extinct mammals of his own. Some of these included restorations with musculature layered atop them, which in the early 1820s could be considered the earliest examples of illustrations of animal tissue built up over fossil skeletons. As huge and detailed fossil restorations were at this point appearing in the same publications as these modest attempts at soft tissue restoration, historians have speculated whether this reflected shame and lack of interest in paleoart as being too speculative to have scientific value at the time. One notable deviation from the Cuvier-like approach is seen in a cartoon drawn by geologist
William Conybeare in 1822. This cartoon depicts paleontologist
William Buckland entering the famous British
Kirkdale Cave, known for its Ice Age mammal remains, amidst a scene of fossil
hyenas restored in the flesh in the ancient cave interior, the first known artwork depicting an extinct animal restored in a rendition of an ancient environment. 's 1830 watercolor painting
Duria Antiquior - A more Ancient Dorset, based on fossils found by
Mary Anning In 1830, the first "fully realized" paleoart scene, depicting prehistoric animals in a realistic geological setting, was painted by British paleontologist
Henry De la Beche. Dubbed
Duria Antiquior — A more Ancient Dorset, this watercolor painting represents a scene from the
Early Jurassic of
Dorset, a fossil-rich region of the British Isles. This painting, based on fossil discoveries along the coast of Dorset by paleontologist
Mary Anning, showcased realistic aspects of fossil animal appearance, behavior, and environment at a level of detail, realism and accuracy that was among the first of its kind. Several of these animals are also depicted defecating, a theme that emerges in other works by De la Beche. For example, his 1829 lithograph called
A Coprolitic Vision, perhaps inspired by Conybeare's Kirkdale Cave cartoon, again pokes fun at William Buckland by placing him at the mouth of a cave surrounded by defecating prehistoric animals. Several authors have remarked on De la Beche's apparent interest in fossilized feces, speculating that even the shape of the cave in this cartoon is reminiscent of the interior of an enormous digestive tract. In any case,
Duria Antiquior inspired many subsequent derivatives, one of which was produced by Nicholas Christian Hohe in 1831 titled
Jura Formation. This piece, published by German paleontologist
Georg August Goldfuss, was the first full paleoart scene to enter scientific publication, and was likely an introduction to other academics of the time to the potential of paleoart. 's 1850s sculptures of an
Iguanodon pair, some of the
Crystal Palace Dinosaurs The role of art in disseminating paleontological knowledge took on a new salience as dinosaur illustration advanced alongside dinosaur paleontology in the mid-1800s. With only fragmentary fossil remains known at the time the term "dinosaur" was coined by Sir
Richard Owen in 1841, the question of life appearance of dinosaurs captured the interest of scientist and public alike. Because of the newness and the limitations of the fossil evidence available at the time, artists and scientists had no frame of reference to draw upon in understanding what dinosaurs looked like in life. For this reason, depictions of dinosaurs at the time were heavily based on living animals such as frogs, lizards, and kangaroos. One of the most famous examples,
Iguanodon, was depicted as a resembling a huge
iguana because the only known fossils of the dinosaur—the jaws and teeth—were thought to resemble those of the living lizard. With Owen's help,
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created the first life-size sculptures depicting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as he thought they may have appeared; he is considered by some to be the first significant artist to apply his skills to the field of dinosaur paleontology. Some of these models were initially created for the
Great Exhibition of 1851, but 33 were eventually produced when
the Crystal Palace was relocated to
Sydenham, in South London. Owen famously hosted a dinner for 21 prominent men of science inside the hollow concrete
Iguanodon on New Year's Eve 1853. However, in 1849, a few years before his death in 1852,
Gideon Mantell had realized that
Iguanodon, of which he was the discoverer, was not a heavy,
pachyderm-like animal, as Owen was putting forward, but had slender forelimbs; his death left him unable to participate in the creation of the
Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures, and so Owen's vision of dinosaurs became that seen by the public. He had nearly two dozen life-sized
sculptures of various prehistoric animals built out of
concrete sculpted over a
steel and
brick framework; two
Iguanodon, one standing and one resting on its belly, were included. The dinosaurs remain in place in the park, but their depictions are now outdated as a consequence both of paleontological progress and of Owen's own misconceptions. 's 1865 illustration of
Iguanodon and
Megalosaurus engaged in combat, from
La Terre Avant le Deluge The Crystal Palace models, despite their inaccuracy by today's standards, were a landmark in the advancement of paleoart as not only a serious academic undertaking, but also one that can capture the interest of the general public. The Crystal Palace dinosaur models were the first works of paleoart to be merchandised as postcards, guide books, and replicas to the general public. In the latter half of the 1800s, this major shift could be seen in other developments taking place in academic books and paintings featuring scientific restorations of prehistoric life. For example, a book by French scientist
Louis Figuier titled
La Terre Avant le Deluge, published in 1863, was the first to feature a series of works of paleoart documenting life through time. Illustrated by French painter
Édouard Riou, this book featured iconic scenes of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals based on Owen's constructions, and would establish a template for academic books featuring artworks of prehistoric life through time for years to come. '' by
Charles R. Knight (1903)
Charles Knight is generally considered one of the key figures in paleoart during this time. His birth three years after
Charles Darwin's publication of the influential
Descent of Man, along with the "
Bone Wars" between rival American paleontologists
Edward Drinker Cope and
Othniel Marsh raging during his childhood, had poised Knight for rich early experiences in developing an interest in reconstructing prehistoric animals. As an avid wildlife artist who disdained drawing from mounts or photographs, instead preferring to draw from life, Knight grew up drawing living animals, but turned toward prehistoric animals against the backdrop of rapidly-expanding paleontological discoveries and the public energy that accompanied the sensationalist coverage of these discoveries around the turn of the 20th century. Knight's foray into paleoart can be traced to a commission ordered by Jacob Wortman in 1894 of a painting of an extinct hoofed animal,
Elotherium, to accompany its fossil display at the
American Museum of Natural History. Knight, who had always preferred to draw animals from life, applied his knowledge of modern pig anatomy to the painting, which so thrilled Wortman that the museum then commissioned Knight to paint a series of
watercolors of various fossils on display.
(then known as Elotherium''), the first commissioned restoration of an extinct animal by Charles R. Knight Throughout the 1920s, '30s and '40s, Knight went on to produce drawings, paintings and murals of dinosaurs, early man, and extinct mammals for the
American Museum of Natural History, where he was mentored by
Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Chicago's
Field Museum, as well as for
National Geographic and many other major magazines of the time, culminating in his last major mural for the
Everhart Museum of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1951. One of Knight's most famous pieces was his
Leaping Laelaps, which he produced for the American Museum of Natural History in 1897. This painting was one of the few works of paleoart produced before 1960 to depict dinosaurs as active, fast-moving creatures, anticipating the next era of paleontological artworks informed by the
dinosaur renaissance.
from the 1925 film The Lost World'' Knight's illustrations also had a large and long-lasting influence on the depiction of prehistoric animals in popular culture. The earliest depictions of dinosaurs in movies, such as the 1933
King Kong film and the 1925 production of
The Lost World, based on the
Arthur Conan Doyle novel of the same name, relied heavily on Knight's dinosaur paintings to produce suitable dinosaur models that were realistic for the time. The special effects artist
Ray Harryhausen would continue basing his movie dinosaurs on Knight illustrations up through the sixties, including for films such as the 1966
One Million Years B.C. and the 1969
Valley of Gwangi. Rudolph Zallinger and Zdeněk Burian both went on to influence the state of dinosaur art while Knight's career began to wind down. Zallinger, a
Russia-born American painter, began working for the
Yale Peabody Museum illustrating
marine algae around the time that the United States entered
World War II. He began his most iconic piece of paleoart, a five-year mural project for the Yale Peabody Museum, in 1942. This mural, titled
The Age of Reptiles, was completed in 1947 and became representative of the modern consensus of dinosaur biology at that time. He later completed a second great mural for the Peabody,
The Age of Mammals, which grew out of a painting published in
Life magazine in 1953. This collaboration led ultimately to the launching of Burian's career in paleoart. 's hypothesized bird ancestor "
Proavis" (1916) Some authors have remarked on a darker, more sinister feel to his paleoart than that of his contemporaries, speculating that this style was informed by Burian's experience producing artwork in his native Czechoslovakia during World War II and, afterwards, under Soviet control. His depictions of suffering, death, and the harsh realities of survival that emerged as themes in his paleoart were unique at the time. Original Burian paintings are on exhibit at the
Dvůr Králové Zoo, the
National Museum (Prague) and at the Anthropos Museum in
Brno. In 2017, the first valid Czech dinosaur was named
Burianosaurus augustai in honor of both Burian and Josef Augusta. While Charles Knight, Rudolph Zallinger and Zdeněk Burian dominated the landscape of "classic" scientific paleoart in the first half of the 20th century, they were far from the only paleoartists working at this time. German landscape painter
Heinrich Harder was illustrating natural history articles, including a series accompanying articles by science writer
Wilhelm Bölsche on earth history for
Die Gartenlaube, a weekly magazine, in 1906 and 1908. He also worked with Bölsche to illustrate 60 dinosaur and other prehistoric animal collecting cards for the Reichardt Cocoa Company, titled "Tiere der Urwelt" ("Animals of the Prehistoric World"). One of Harder's contemporaries, Danish paleontologist
Gerhard Heilmann, produced a large number of sketches and ink drawings related to
Archaeopteryx and
avian evolution, culminating in his lavishly illustrated and controversial treatise
The Origin of Birds, published in 1926.
The dinosaur renaissance (1970–2010) This classic depiction of dinosaurs remained the status quo until the 1960s, when a minor scientific revolution began changing the perceptions of dinosaurs as tail-dragging, sluggish animals to active, alert creatures. This reformation took place following the 1964 discovery of
Deinonychus by paleontologist
John Ostrom. Ostrom's description of this nearly-complete birdlike dinosaur, published in 1969, challenged the presupposition of dinosaurs as cold-blooded, slow-moving reptiles, instead finding that many of these animals were likely reminiscent of birds, not just in evolutionary history and classification but in appearance and behavior as well. This idea had been advanced before, most notably by 1800s English biologist
Thomas Huxley about the link between dinosaurs, modern birds, and the then-newly discovered
Archaeopteryx. With the discovery and description of
Deinonychus, however, Ostrom had laid out the strongest evidence yet of the close link between birds and dinosaurs. The artistic reconstructions of
Deinonychus by his student,
Robert Bakker, remain iconic of what came to be known as the dinosaur renaissance. American scientist-artist Gregory Paul, working originally as Bakker's student in the 1970s, became one of the leading illustrators of prehistoric reptiles in the 1980s and has been described by some authors as the paleoartist who may "define modern paleoart more than any other". '' specimen
AMNH 5027 mounted in a "leaping posture" by
Robert Bakker at the
Denver Museum of Nature and Science Ostrom, Bakker and Paul changed the landscape of depictions of prehistoric animals in science and popular culture alike throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Their influence affected the presentation of museum displays throughout the world and eventually found its way into popular culture, with the climax of this period perhaps best marked by the
1990 novel and
1993 film Jurassic Park. Paul in particular helped set the stage for the next wave of paleoartistry, and from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century, paleoartists working from the 'rigorous' approach included
Douglas Henderson, Mark Hallett,
Michael Skrepnick,
William Stout,
Ely Kish,
Luis Rey,
John Gurche, Bob Walters, and others, including an expanding body of sculpting work led by artists such as
Brian Cooley,
Stephen Czerkas, and Dave Thomas. Many of these artists developed unique and lucrative stylistic niches without sacrificing their rigorous approach, such as Douglas Henderson's detailed and atmospheric landscapes, and Luis Rey's brightly-colored, "extreme" depictions. This movement was working in parallel with great strides in the scientific progress of vertebrate paleontology that were occurring during this time. Precision in anatomy and artistic reconstruction was aided by an increasingly detailed and sophisticated understanding of these extinct animals through new discoveries and interpretations that pushed paleoart into more objective territory with respect to accuracy. For example, the feathered dinosaur revolution, facilitated by unprecedented discoveries in the
Liaoning province of northern
China in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was perhaps foreseen by artist Sarah Landry, who drew the first
feathered dinosaur for Bakker's seminal
Scientific American article in 1975. One of the first major shows of dinosaur art was published in 1986 by Sylvia Czerkas, along with the accompanying volume
Dinosaurs Past and Present. Witton (2018) characterizes the modern movement with the rise of
digital art, as well as the establishment of an internet community that would enable paleoartists and enthusiasts to network, share digitized and
open access scientific resources, and to build a global community that was unprecedented until the first decade of the twenty-first century. The continuum of work leading from the themes and advances that began in the dinosaur renaissance to the production of modern paleoart is showcased in several books that were published post-2010, such as
Steve White's ''Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart
(2012) and its "sequel", Dinosaur Art II: The Cutting Edge of Paleoart
(2017). Additionally, the traditional heuristics used in paleoart up to this point were shown to produce illustrations of modern animals that failed to depict these accurately. These ideas were formalized in a 2012 book by paleoartists John Conway and Nemo Ramjet (also known as C.M Kosemen), along with paleontologist Darren Naish, called All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals''. This book and its associated minor paradigm shift, commonly referred to as the "All Yesterdays" movement, argued that it was better to employ scientifically rigorous "reasoned speculation" to produce a greater range of speculative, but plausible, reconstructions of prehistoric animals. Conway and colleagues argued that the range of appearances and behaviors depicted in paleoart had only managed to capture a very narrow range of what's plausible, based on the limited data available, and that artistic approaches to these depictions had become "overly steeped in tradition". For example,
All Yesterdays examines the small, four-winged
dromaeosaur Microraptor in this context. This dinosaur, described in 2003, has been depicted by countless paleoartists as a "strange, dragon-like feathered glider with a reptilian face". Conway's illustration of
Microraptor in
All Yesterdays attempts to restore the animal "from scratch" without influence from these popular reconstructions, instead depicting it as a naturalistic, birdlike animal perched at its nest. Shrink-wrapping is a conservative approach to paleoart, in which the artists avoid speculating and reconstruct extinct animals with their skin tightly over the skeletal system and muscle while ignoring features such as cartilage, fat, and hair/feathers. While traditionally common in paleo art in the 2020s heavy shrink wrapping can cause paleoart to be seen as inaccurate or not credible. Shrink-wrapping is a "heated topic" in the paleoart community Other authors write in agreement that the modern paleoart movement incorporates an element of "challenging tropes and the status quo" and that paleoart has "entered its experimental phase" as of the dawn of the 21st century. A 2013 study found that older paleoart was still influential in popular culture long after new discoveries made them obsolete. This was explained as
cultural inertia. In a 2014 paper, Mark Witton, Darren Naish, and John Conway outlined the historical significance of paleoart, and criticized the over-reliance on clichés and the "culture of copying" they saw to be problematic in the field at the time. This tendency to copy "
memes" established and proliferated by others in the field is thought to have been a stimulus for the "All Yesterdays" movement of injecting originality back into paleoart. ==Recognition==