For the last few years, Rebecca Dart has been blowing the minds of her social media followers with her dynamic and atmospheric paleoart, and her #DrawDinovember output is legendary. More than any other artist, her body of paleoart feels uniquely suited to social media. As you scroll through her feed, the rounded square framing device she uses evokes the feeling of using a Viewmaster, seeing single frames selected from moving worlds that existed before we looked, persisting after. A veteran…
From paleoart to spec evo and biologically plausible fantasy creatures, Mette Aumala’s artwork spans genres and embraces a dizzying diversity of aesthetic approaches. Through all of this diversity, there is a strong through-line, a clear fascination with evolution and a curiosity that seems to demand so many varying approaches to manifest. I’m happy to bring you this interview, in which we discuss her artistic journey and her practice. What are your earliest memories as an enthusiast of prehistoric life? Was…
Ever bought a dinosaur toy but were super bummed it looked nothing like the scientific reconstructions? Are you done with pronated hands on commercial theropod figures? Have you had it with that Papo T. rex plastered everywhere on the Internet? Well, have we got a toy designer for you. Based in New Jersey, David Silva is a toy designer and founder of Creative Beast Studio. A graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, he has spent almost two decades…
If you’re a dinosaur fan on social media, you might have stumbled upon Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong, a long-running, brilliant educational YouTube series in which dinosaur enthousiast Steven Bellettini reviews toy dinosaurs and judges their scientific accuracy. One of the real joys of watching the show is seeing Steven’s animations, in which the toy dinosaur gradually transforms into a much more scientifically informed version of itself. After a long hiatus, during which the longtime home of the show, the National…
When I first spotted the art of Kuzim on Twitter, I was immediately struck by his unique style. “Low poly” is an art style that deliberately invokes the asthetics of early 3D video games. The recent revival of this style has, so far, mostly been the domain of indie video games, but Kuzim has taken this quirky flavour to the prehistoric realm. The bold colour schemes, the dynamic compositions and the deceptive simplicity make him a unique voice among the…
There’s no one way to do paleoart. No one is proving that more than Mary Sanche. Based in Drumheller, Alberta, Sanche is a graphic designer for the famed Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. As a science & editorial illustrator, she creates not only paleoart, but work that spans across many different genres. Her work sometimes blends styles and genres together, creating unique works of art that draw audiences in. Her list of publications and exhibitions include Canadian Geographic, the Nature…
Just outside the small town of Boxtel, close to the city of Eindhoven in the South of the Netherlands, lies the Oertijdmuseum, or the Museum of Ancient Time. It’s been on my radar for some time as a destination for all things palaeontological. In 2018, the Oertijdmuseum received national media attention thanks to their acquisition of a Diplodocus skeleton. It is actually a composite of three subadult individuals, collectively named “Kirby”, after their discoverer, Hans-Jakob “Kirby” Siber. The associated information…
Today I’m excited to bring you an interview with one of the most prominent paleoartists working today, Gabriel Ugueto. If you are on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and follow paleoart at all, you are likely well aware of the astonishing scope and quality of art flowing out of Gabriel’s studio. From field guide-style lateral view restorations to fully fleshed-out, full color environments to evocative pieces rendered with the minimal color of ink, Gabriel’s body of work has attracted masses of…
We all knew that a great many dinosaurs were airheads, but were we presuming too much about what was going on in and around their gorgeous skulls? In their paper The Frontoparietal Fossa and Dorsotemporal Fenestra of Archosaurs and Their Significance for Interpretations of Vascular and Muscular Anatomy in Dinosaurs, published in The Anatomical Record, Holliday et al. look at the anatomy of existing archosaurs and apply their findings to an aspect of dinosaur cranial anatomy that we’d always taken…
In the Windy City, there are extinct creatures being brought back to life…sort of. Liam Elward is an aspiring paleoartist from Chicago, Illinois. His portfolio ranges a whole manner of extinct lineages and geologic periods, from the Carboniferous edaphosaurids to Cenozoic megafauna like early cetaceans and proboscideans. His work has been lauded by paleontologists and fellow paleoartists alike, including: Jim Kirkland, Darren Naish, Keenan Taylor, and Jaime Headden. Elward is currently pursuing an education in art, and in his spare…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.