Vintage Dinosaur Art: Hubrecht at the Lyceum – Part 2

It’s high time we go back to Amsterdam and talk about the Marie Hubrecht murals at the Joke Smit College. You may or may not recall me talking about the amazing Jurassic/Cretaceous mural. If not, that will be your homework (we are at a school, after all). That was a while ago, and I promised you more.

Of course, “more” in this case means we have to leave my comfort zone of Dinosaur World and dive all the way into Deep Time, as Great Aunt Marie would not be satisfied unless she could tell the story of the history of life on Earth as fully and comprehensively as she could! This does mean my expertise on these animals – and the history of their depictions – is a little more limited, but we shall do what we can nonetheless!

I’ve been saying so far that there are seven paintings, but Tempus Cambrianum and Tempus Silurum actually share one canvas, which occupies the east wall. I will still regard them as separate. The diptych was the first to be finished and it depicts the earliest periods chronologically. Tempus Cambrianum here (I’m not sure if the Latin is any good)  is situated over a doorway and thus slightly shorter in height than its neighbour.

The waterline neatly separates this scene into a top and a bottom half. The top half shows a barren, stormy world, with landmasses still being shaped by volcanism. The bottom half, by contrast, shows an ocean full of life. Primitive life, perhaps, but lots of it.

Above the waves we see nothing but rock and sea. The moon, surrounded by a halo, is the most prominent detail, the halo formed from the rising vapour. The columns of vapour rising up from the island look spectacular. This half of the painting seems deliberately blurry, misty. The world is still being formed. Verdwenen Werelden also has an incarnation of this tableau, where it represents a precambrian scene.

Hubrecht’s worlds are always teeming with life. Crinoids and medusae and whozits galore. There’s a tiny, blurry reddish arthropod on the furthest right, likely meant to be Strabops. That one’s definitely based on some of the classic eurypterid reconstructions.  Müller-Mainz, Smit and Vatagin depict sea scorpions in much the same way, though I don’t know what ground zero is for this one. If anyone has any clue, I’m definitely listening…

The jellyfish are rendered with a certain degree of skill. I’m not a jellyfish expert by any means, but many of these look nearly modern to me. Fossil medusae, proper jellyfish, are rare, as you might expect from an animal with no hard bits. They do exist, however, and they do seem to go as far back as the Cambrian, so Marie is not out of line here. Note the little shrimp-like goober hiding among the crinoids on the right. Marie’s seas tend to be rather dark, murky and foreboding, even though the animals are rendered clearly.

The Burgess shale was still being worked on as Marie did her work, so no Anomalocaris, Hallucigenia or Opabinia here. The real superstars of the Cambrian don’t yet get their due. What we do get is lots of trilobites, different species all, as well as molluscs and worms and sea cucumbers and brachiopods. The thing in the lower left corner looks like a goose barnacle. I wonder where, specifically, she got all this knowledge from. Animals like this often got more attention in historic books on natural history than they tend to get these days. There’s a number of English and German works in particular that might have been Marie’s inspiration. I’m thinking of the works of Henry Knipe and the notorious Othenio Abel, but there’s probably a wealth of early 20th century palaeontology I’m not yet aware of.

This piece doesn’t resemble any equivalent illustrations in Verdwenen Werelden all that much, so I have a hard time matching the animals to their intended genera. I am especially intrigued by the trilobite to the left of the sponges (Olenellus armatus?), with its high, stilt-like legs, and the almost fish-shaped one directly above it (O. thompsoni?). As ususal with Marie, the piece looks very crowded and really rewards looking at for a long time. The little critters are very colourful and cute. How about that red worm with the tentacle face? The blue worm with the bulging black eye? Another appearance of the standard eurypterid, made to look very small?

The large cephalopod that catches the eye on the left is likely Orthoceras, one of the most famous Palaeozoic animals at the time. Directly above it, the previously mentioned blue worm looks like it could perhaps be be a later addition, realized with much sharper, hastier lines. As we might discuss in part 3, it is not entirely unlikely that Marie was beginning to lose patience with her mammoth task as time went on.

Again, I’m finding Marie’s large-scale mural work here more satisfying than the smaller, sometimes much more indistinct pieces in the book.

The Cambrian and the Silurian are separated by Marie’s ornamental border, but the waterline is still at the same height, giving both halves of the diptych a sense of continuity. As the Cambrian half is situated over a doorway, the Silurian half is somewhat taller. There is no Ordovician; the period between the Cambrian and the Silurian was proposed by scientists, but it was not internationally accepted by the scientific community until the 1960s. Another indicator of continuity is that the menagerie of beasties here is fairly similar: we’ve got trilobites, cephalopods, eurypterids and jellyfish, this time joined by fish!

Once more, let’s see what the world up top, still lifeless as of yet, looks like. There’s still an amount of smoke and volcanic turmoil in the air, but as the eye moves left to right, it begins to clear up and give way to what looks like blue sky. I’m under the impression that Marie was depicting a world that was just freshly formed out of tectonic chaos and boling magma, and is only now beginning to cool off, opening itself up to its first enterprising terrestrial inhabitants. It’s morning on Planet Earth. This is pure interpretation, mind you.

Under the surface, life is in full bloom as always. The cephalopods, sea scorpions and jellyfish are now joined by fish, three different ones. These three do not appear in VW, so I can’t identify them. The cephalopods with the jolly curls at the end of their shells are all Ooceras, a deeply obscure genus that Marie appears rather fond of.

Very peculiar are the long-tentacled, blue-white creatures. There’s one in the center that looks vaguely spidery and one towards the right that looks like a pin cushion, stuck with acupuncture needles. Again, these two have disappeared from VW; I have no idea what they are meant to be. One of the things that I wasn’t expecting when taking this project on is how much Marie had moved on from this by the time she worked on VW; the more you compare both works, the more differences you spot.

On the cetre right here, the big eurypterid Pterygotus makes an appearance in a starring role. So does Orthoceras on the furthest right. The crinoids and trilobites are also joined on the sea floor by starfish, shrimp and sea snails. Marie also finds space to include large formations of coral, adding splashes of red. In between the two central coral beds swims a creature that reminds me of something out of Alien!

Moving clockwise, the leftmost painting on the south wall is the Tempus Devonicum, which I believe to be the smallest of the canvases (although the Cambrian half of the previous diptych is the smallest individual scene).

The Devonicum is a colourful piece that looks quite joyful. I think Marie had great fun painting all this. Once again, a water line separates the piece in a terrestrial top half, and an underwater bottom half teeming with life. The separation occurs much further down, however, indicating that, this time around, the terrestrial portion will be more important.

Hello, Planet Earth in the Devonian! Long time no see. Have you done something with your hair? No, you’ve grown plants! On the right bank of the water, a full forest of tree ferns has risen, releasing lots of lovely oxygen into the air. The plants are all based on fossil genera such as Eospermatopteris and Aneurophyton. As always, Marie’s research into paleobotany is as thorough as it is in animals – how rare is it for a paleoartist to do any research into the plants at all? The left bank is still mostly desert and mountain ranges, but here, too, you can see that plants have been colonizing the coastline. No animals can be made out as of yet. It’s possible no early tetrapods were even known at the time. Touching points such as Ichthyostega, Acanthostega and Tiktaalik were not described until later. Marie leaves the land empty for science to fill in.

If you’re anything like me, the big gnarly predatory placoderm fish Dinichthys immediately catches the attention. Its scary mouth is slightly downplayed here, but it still looks quite nightmarish! Also pretty gnarly are the sea scorpions on the seafloor, consisting of Eurypterus (left) and Sylonurus (right). The latter sticks out in particular for bright, strikingly sharp colours contrasting with the gloomy sea. I like the bright yellow fish (some other placoderm, I suppose)  and the endearing upside-down ammonite.

On the far left here, we observe a black and white striped fish that looks suspiciously like a juvenile zebra shark, Stegostoma tigrinum. The familiar adults are spotted (which is why they are also called leopard sharks, not to be confused with Triakis semifasciata) but the live-borne pups have zebra stripes, which is why they are called zebra sharks in the first place. They look exactly like this, which makes you wonder how many more extant animals Marie snuck into her natural history work.

Other than that, some tube worms, more corals and crinoids, and another big placoderm. Placoderms are armoured fish exclusive to the Silurian and Devonian; I think they are paraphyletic.

The bottom right corner of the Devonian is a particularly colourful bunch of fish, corals and an ammonite (this one is the right way up) that was charmingly painted in broad strokes. At a distance, Hubrecht’s work can be hard to read, but these murals in particular are really made for zooming in and admiring all the details, which are often quite sharply delineated. There’s a starfish on its right with playful curves. Hiding among reddish algae is a blue fish with white spots – it has the colours of a coelacanth! The trilobites are also not forgotten, and still have a presence in the Devonian. Marie leaves no stone unturned, no animal or clade gets forgotten, every invertebrate and vertebrate has its place. No wonder her work is so full of dazzling detail.

And with that, I will leave you for now. Three murals remain: The Carboniferous, the Permian and the Triassic. Here, we will see that the proceedings take a bit of a turn. Stay tuned to find out, beacuse Marie Hubrecht will return!