Dinosaur art evolves with new discoveries in paleontology

Under soft museum lights, the massive skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex is easy to imagine fleshed out and alive, scimitar teeth glimmering. What did it look like in life? How did its face contort under the Montana sun some 66 million years ago? What color and texture was its body? Was it gauntly wrapped in scales, fluffy with feathers, or a mix of both? Among the earliest examples of paleoart, this 1830 watercolor painting, called Duria Antiquior or “A more ancient Dorset,” imagines England's South Coast populated by ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche. Increasingly, paleontologists can offer answers to these questions, thanks to evidence of dinosaur soft tissues discovered in the last 30 years. Translating those discoveries into works that satisfy the public’s imagination is the purview of paleoartists, the scientific illustrators who reconstruct prehistory in paintings, drawings, and sculptures in exhibit halls, books, magazines, and films. Those creations necessarily require some artistic license, says freelancer Gabriel Ugueto, who’s based in Miami, FL. As new discoveries offer artists a better sense of what their subjects looked like, the findings also constrain their creativity, he says, by leaving fewer details to the imagination. Even so, he and other artists welcome new discoveries, as the field strives for accuracy. The challenge now is sifting through all this new information, including characteristics that are still up for debate, such as the extent of T. rex’s feathers, to conjure new visions of the prehistoric world. Paleoartists often have a general science background or formal artistic training, although career paths vary. “There is no one way that people get into paleoart,” says Mark Witton, a paleoartist and paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, who recently wrote a paleoart handbook (1). Regardless of their …