A great deal of my life has been dedicated to both observing nature and speculating about how it once was, based upon whatever solid paleontological literature I can get my hands on and my own observations of the natural world. Having imagined and drawn dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters for nearly my whole life, I have finally decided to commit myself to pushing my paleo-art to the next level. In addition to improving the overall quality of technical execution, I feel it is high time that I begin to create images which illustrate some of the behavioral, environmental and anatomical theories that have been quietly developing in the depths of my imagination.
Although it is both foolishly ambitious and presumptuous for me, an artist with almost no formal scientific training, to attempt to create illustrations which depict my own original “scientific” concepts, I am convinced as an observer of nature that one of the best ways to test theories about the behavior of extinct animals is to attempt to depict it realistically in a visual medium. Because extinct animals can really only live in our imaginations, I think it is the duty of artists to put forth new visualizations of these creatures in order to challenge old ideas about how they lived while at once stimulating new discourse and investigation into hypotheses which might not otherwise receive serious consideration. Unless we constantly re-imagine the prehistoric world, we will never refine our ideas about how it might have worked.
In the image above an Apatosaur follows a game trail through an ancient conifer forest covered in moss. The idea for this illustration came when I was thinking about how old growth forests would look if they were stripped of their undergrowth by the constant grazing of large animals (dinosaurs!). With little competition from shrubs or edible lichens, low-nutrient plants like mosses and liverworts would have thrived, spreading unhindered across the forest floor and up the trunks of trees. Game trails would have probably crisscrossed these forest barrens, linking meadows, water holes and other places of good grazing on the forest’s edge where there was more sunlight and thus more food. That’s the idea anyway… I guess the picture is really just a dino strollin’ through a super mossy forest.
