Ontograph Studios Newswire

Last week I attended the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in Lyme Regis. I won’t summarise the meeting, as you can read all about it Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology. Instead, I will concentrate on Ontograph Studio’s contribution,  All Yesterdays: Unexpected and Unusual Reconstructions of the Past (That We Don’t Know are Wrong). I decided to present All Yesterdays on an actual slide projector:

The magnificent Braun Paximat Electric.

Because that was clearly the most absurd way for a digital artist to present their work.

The presentation was collaboration with fellow Ontograph Studioist Cevdet Kosemen. Here’s the abstract:

Reconstructing extinct vertebrates can be approached in a strictly methodological way, by weighing likelihoods and piecing together the most probable appearance of any given animal based on what is currently known. However, it is often the case that new information takes us by surprise—animals are often stranger than we would have imagined.

In this presentation, we will take the opposite approach to the one we usually do as paleontological artists, and explore the possibilities rather than the probabilities. Inspired by recent debates in palaeontological art, we took part in an exercise of plausible speculation with novel forms of integument and display structures, as well details of life such as disease, inter-species interaction and play behaviour that is rarely displayed in contemporary palaeontological art.

While we agree that the purpose of palaeontological art is to mainly display the latest knowledge about extinct animals, it can also serve as an arena to propose new hypotheses, rather than repetitively drawing proven theories. In the history of palaeontology, out-of-the-norm images have been crucial in popularising new notions about the appearance and behaviour of extinct animals. While we are aware that some of our reconstructions will probably be falsified, some may actually “hit the spot,” or may even look modest when compared to new fossil discoveries.

On with some slides:

A plesiosaur making like some coral.

Protoceratops climbing trees.

A porky Parasaurolophus.

Leaellynasaura goes the full furry.

The presentation went down pretty well, especially at the front of the room, and there may be a super-secret book in the works.

Two examples of Australian megafauna, the giant wombat relative Diprotodon, which is the largest known marsupial, and Procoptodon, the largest known kangaroo. Both lived until comparatively recently, and went extinct between 40 and 18 thousand years ago.

You can download it here (right click and select “save link as”).

This month’s download is a desktop wallpaper of the terrifying Carboniferous tetrapod Anthracosaurus russeli. Anthracosaurus is one of dozens of amphibious critters figured in Robert Carroll’s excellent book The Rise of Amphibians.

You can download the full-sized wallpaper here.