Comments on: Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions

By: prehistoric age

prehistoric age — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:14:45 +0000

nice book. what is the price.

By: Zhen

Zhen — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:01:32 +0000

@ Richard Milner: What, really? I was there last month and I was pretty sure most of them weren’t there. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. I know the Allosaurus painting was placed right along side of the skeleton in clear view. I’ll have to double check. I actually have video footage of my trip. Not that it matters if I’m not looking at the right place.

By: Richard Milner

Richard Milner — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:31:07 +0000

For Zhen: Last time I visited the American Museum of Natural History (not long ago) I seem to recall that many of the dinosaur paintings were still in place, including the brontosaur/apatosaur, trachodons, dimetrodon (the sail-back mammal-like reptile), and others.

They are all small paintings, and you have to search them out in the halls. Contrary to popular belief, Knight never did any dinosaur murals for the AMNH. Those are all in the Field Museum in Chicago.

The AMNH also exhibits (in various places around the Museum) the restored murals of the wooly mammoths and reindeer tromping through the snow, the giant moose Cervalces and beaver in Pleistocene New Jersey, the Neanderthal family, and the Ice Age cave artists as Font-de-Gaume. Early horses in Texas and titanothere murals are also still in place.

And thanks, Brian, for the wonderful reviews.

By: Dan Chure

Dan Chure — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:06:29 +0000

Concerning the change in color patterns on the Stegosaurus at Dinosaur National Monument, as I discussed on my blog, the appropriateness of that depends on what you see as the model’s function. We want visitors to think about dinosaurs as living animals. Color can be related to much of behavior in vertebrates, such as concealment, sexual signaling, juvenile vs adult stages, etc. Since the Stegosaurus is the model we have it is the one we used. We do not want to present the model as an example of past thinking about dinosaurs or as some kind of historical curiosity because we do not see ourselves as that kind of historical museum. One could certainly do that and repaint the model to look as it did in 1963. That’s just not what we see our mission to be. It was not donated to Dinosaur with any stiplulations about not changing the color. The model has undergone numerous repaintings since it arrived here, this is just the latest one.

By: Zhen

Zhen — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:52:16 +0000

It’s sad that we no longer see any of his art in the dinosaur section of the AMNH save for the Allosaurus. All of Knight’s dinosaur paints are gone, but the mammals are still there. Some of them anyway.

By: BJ Nicholls

BJ Nicholls — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:30:11 +0000

I believe the correct last name for Knight’s friend who created the Sinclair dinosaur sculptures is Jonas.

http://www.wildlifeart.org/artists/artistDetails/index.php?aID=233

I didn’t know that Knight and Jonas had a connection. That relationship makes the recent “revisioning” of the Jonas’ stegosaur at Dinosaur National Monument all the more unfortunate. As I posted at my blog, I maintain that it’s no more appropriate to repaint Louis Paul Jonas’ sculpture than it would be to revise the the murals of Charles R. Knight to reflect contemporary science. Not only does this disrespect the artist, it obscures history. Artistic reconstruction has been and remains essential to paleontology. It’s no more appropriate for us to revise a reconstruction than it would be to revise and update historic science papers.