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Richard Milner's 'Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time.'

There has never been a more influential paleoartist than Charles R. Knight. He wasn’t the first to illustrate prehistoric life, and he certainly was not the last to do so with great skill, but, for a time, he envisioned dinosaurs and other ancient creatures with such loving detail that he seemed to be sending back snapshots from lost eras only he could visit.

Science writer Richard Milner recounted Knight’s story in his visual and textual mix-tape of the artist’s work, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. The book is not a straight biography. Even though Milner composed a detailed summary of Knight’s life for the book’s introductory section, the bulk of the glossy volume is a showroom of Knight’s art and quotes from his books and articles. A set of closing chapters covers Knight’s legacy, from efforts to restore cracking murals to the artist’s dream of a scientifically accurate dinosaur theme park, but the greater portion of the volume is a portfolio of Knight’s range and skill.

I did not know much about Knight before reading Milner’s biographical section. I imagined that Knight was simply a passionate observer of nature who committed his imagination to canvas and paper. As Milner ably demonstrates, Knight’s cherished body of work is the fruit of multiple struggles, both physical and vocational, from the time of his birth in 1874. Born with severe nearsightedness, a playtime accident when Knight was a young boy virtually robbed him of sight in his right eye. His vision continued to deteriorate during his entire life. Knight was legally blind by the end of his career, and he had to hold his face only inches from the canvas to see what he was painting.

Knight was also a finicky and often cantankerous artist who had a difficult relationship with his primary sponsor, the American Museum of Natural History. Although Knight’s initial love was illustrating living animals—he designed a bison for a 30 cent stamp and created sculptured visages of animals for the Bronx Zoo that can still be seen on some of the old buildings—in 1894 he was asked to restore the fossil mammal Entelodon for AMNH scientist Jacob Wortman. Wortman and his colleagues were thrilled with the result. It was a triumph for Knight, who had learned a great deal of anatomy from taxidermists at the museum, and paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn desperately wanted Knight to be the museum’s chief restorer of prehistoric creatures.

Neither Knight nor Osborn were easy men to work with. Knight refused to have collaborators and rejected almost all criticism. He wanted to hear only scientific corrections from Osborn, and he frequently argued with Osborn about critiques others made of his paintings. And, despite Osborn’s wishes, Knight repeatedly refused to become a museum employee. He wanted to stay a freelance artist, and this created new problems. Osborn had to raise additional funding for Knight’s work, and to do this he often wanted sketches or samples to convince patrons. Knight, however, would not budge on the work until funding was secured and his terms regarding criticism were agreed upon. Knight needed Osborn because the artist was almost perpetually broke or in debt due to poor money handling, and Osborn needed Knight because there was no finer animal artist anywhere. This was a tense alliance that almost completely broke down when Knight created a series of prehistoric murals for the better-funded Field Museum—a project similar to one Osborn had been planning to execute with Knight for the AMNH dinosaur halls. Still, the two eventually overcome their pride and remained friends, albeit ones frequently frustrated by each other.

Knight also showed off his cantankerous nature in numerous editorials. He hated news and magazine articles that made animals seem overly cute or especially vicious, although Knight probably reserved most of his hatred for modern art. Knight loathed the popularity of artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Knight thought their works were “monstrous and inexplicable creations masquerading in the name of art.” Matisse, according to Knight, couldn’t even accurately draw a bird. Knight believed that the modern art movement was primarily the product of savvy art dealers and advertisers. There was a bit of sour grapes about this. As modern art gained in popularity, Knight had an increasingly difficult time selling his own work. People were just not interested in realistic paintings of animals.

Knight’s successes were hard-won, but, as Milner’s biography illustrates, the artist could not have done anything else. Knight’s undeniable passion was painting prehistory into life. A few snippets in the book provide some insights into Knight’s process. For dinosaurs, at least, Knight would often study the mounted skeletons of the animals and then, on the basis of this framework, create a sculpture. He could then study this three-dimensional representation for the play of shadow across the body under different conditions, and from this model Knight would then begin painting. In the case of his murals, though, Knight designed the art but did not paint the actual, full-size pieces himself as Rudolph Zallinger did with the Age of Reptiles. Instead, Knight created a smaller version of the mural which was then expanded according to a grid system by painters. Knight added only touch-up details to the murals.

Those murals and various other paintings continued to inspire artists and scientists after Knight’s death in 1953. After seeing images of absolutely atrocious, cut-rate dinosaur sculptures at a park in South Dakota, Knight wanted to create his own, scientifically accurate garden of dinosaurs and appropriate, Mesozoic-type flora somewhere in Florida. Knight never attracted the investors necessary to create the park, but the idea was carried on by his friend Louis Paul Jones in the form of Sinclair Dinoland at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Likewise, Knight’s cutting comments about prehistoric mammal sculptures at the La Brea asphalt seeps in Los Angeles led the institution to eventually commission new, better sculptures after Knight’s style. Even ripoffs of Knight’s work influenced culture. When Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World initially ran in serial form, illustrations based heavily on Knight’s paintings accompanied the text, and the film version of the story featured a now-defunct horned dinosaur genus, Agathaumas, that was clearly based on a painting Knight created with some tips from an ailing Edward Drinker Cope.

Knight was a brilliant and taciturn artist. He constantly battled his boss, artistic society and his own eyesight to create intricate scenes inspired by old bones. In doing so, he elevated realistic, scientific representations of life through the ages into a lovely artistic hybrid. Even as new discoveries about dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and other creatures make some of Knight’s illustrations seem dated, his paintings still carry the reflection of someone who joyfully reveled in the story of life.

Just a small part of the huge bonebed which is Dinosaur National Monument's quarry wall. Photo by the author.

Two summers ago, I visited Dinosaur National Monument for the first time. The park was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen, but, I have to admit, I left a little disappointed. Ever since I was a dinosaur-crazed kid I wanted to see the famous quarry wall strewn with hundreds of bones representing some of the most famous Late Jurassic dinosaurs. But when I arrived, the building that housed the bones had already been closed for three years. The geology of the site worked against the edifice by expanding and contracting by minute amounts over and over again—so much so that parts of the building had shifted dramatically and put the entire structure at risk of collapse.

Not long before my initial visit, though, it was announced that the park would receive more than $13 million to restore the building and welcome visitors once more. I couldn’t wait for the grand re-opening, especially after I spent more than a week and a half looking for new fossils at the monument with the Natural History Museum of Utah field crew this past summer. I saw the quarry building from the road every day I was in the field, but I had to wait until October 4, 2011 for the doors of the quarry to once again open to the public.

As it stands now, the famous quarry wall is only a portion of what once was. The site once extended about 100 feet to either side of the current quarry face, and the bonebed also extended upwards to a higher hill that paleontologist Earl Douglass and his co-workers removed during the early 20th century. Many of the fossils they discovered in those parts of the quarry can now be seen at museums such as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. (Those old bones were recently refurbished in a new dinosaurs exhibit I got to see during last year’s SVP conference.) Nevertheless, the quarry face is still a beautiful site. Partially articulated limbs, a sauropod skull situated on the end of a vertebral string, parts of various spinal columns and numerous isolated bones can be seen poking out all over the rock face. That’s how they will remain—prep work has stopped on the fossils, and they will stay in their place as a lesson about life and death 149 million years ago.

An Allosaurus munches on a baby Stegosaurus in the new DNM mural created by Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger. Photo by the author.

The bones are the main draw, of course, but the new museum also boasts some impressive extras. Several skeleton casts on the lower level introduce visitors to some of the charismatic creatures seen scattered over the quarry wall, and a beautiful mural by artists Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger fleshes out Late Jurassic dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Torvosaurus, Dryosaurus and Apatosaurus, in addition to the many small mammals and reptiles that lived alongside them. Make sure you turn around to look at the mural behind the baby Stegosaurus cast when leaving the building—I don’t think I have ever seen an illustration of an Allosaurus chomping down on a baby Stegosaurus before.

More updates and improvements are scheduled but were not ready at the time of the big unveiling. The museum will include virtual displays that will explain how so many dinosaurs came to be accumulated in one spot, as well as what bones on the quarry wall correspond to which dinosaurs. Even without those extras, though, the new quarry wall is a fantastic testament to deep time, evolution and a lost world we are still striving to understand.

For more details about Dinosaur National Monument, see the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitor Center Project blog. The blog is written by Dan Chure, the park’s paleontologist.

The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush by Paul Brinkman.

Many visitors to natural history museums—especially children—come to see just one thing: dinosaurs. No major institution can be without a hall of enormous Jurassic and Cretaceous animals (with the smaller, lesser-known Triassic dinosaurs taking their places along the margins), but the American occupation with the biggest and baddest Mesozoic creatures is relatively new. Even though dinosaurs captured the public’s imagination relatively early on —appearing in cartoons, poetry and other bits of pop culture in the 1820′s—they were still almost entirely absent from American museums at the close of the 19th century. Even at the height of the infamous “Bone Wars” between the academics O.C. Marsh and E.D. Cope, public museum displays typically boasted little more than a few teeth and a limb bone or two.

As historian and paleontologist Paul Brinkman illustrates in his new book, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, today’s spectacular dinosaur displays have their roots in the turn-of-the-20th-century contest to see who could obtain the most impressive sauropod dinosaur. The American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum and the Field Museum competed to find the most complete Jurassic dinosaur specimens possible (skeletons that are still prominently on display in each institution to this day), yet this second “dinosaur rush” was a bit different from the rough-and-tumble expeditions of Cope and Marsh. Rather than actively try to savage one another’s reputation, teams from each of the institutions tried to lure away members of opposing groups and kept a watchful eye on what their competitors were doing, with whatever controversies erupted being a result of museum politics instead of Wild West antics. They did not always get along, but they had common goals, and so many of the paleontologists working at that time hated Marsh that each team was trying to find its own way of showing that America’s former leading paleontologist was not as brilliant as he thought he was.

Much of Brinkman’s book records the movements and activities of the paleontologists employed by the various museums as they scouted Jurassic-age dinosaur sites in the American West. There are quite a few famous names to keep track of —H.F. Osborn, John Bell Hatcher, William Diller Matthew, Barnum Brown, Elmer Riggs, Olaf Peterson, J.L. Wortman and others—and a number of them switched institutions during the period in question. At times it is easy to get confused about who was working for whom, but this is less the fault of Brinkman’s clear prose than of the politics and dealings of early-20th-century paleontologists.

Although I would have preferred a little more analysis of how discoveries in the field were translated into academic and popular images of dinosaurs—something discussed primarily in the conclusion, in relation to the role of paleontology in large museums—Brinkman’s work fills in a considerable gap in our understanding of the history of paleontology. Every paleontologist worth his or her salt is familiar with the names Osborn, Hatcher, Riggs and the like, but few have paid much attention to the details of how these researchers collected specimens and kept paleontology thriving during a time when their discipline was being superseded by genetics and other biological sciences in universities. Had large museums not been so interested in fostering their paleontology programs—programs with great potential to collect specimens that would bring in hordes of patrons—the science may very well have stagnated. Although paleontologists sometimes found themselves caught up in red tape or working for finicky institutional administrators, both museums and paleontology benefited from the close collaboration.

If I have any significant criticism of Brinkman’s work, it is that the book should have included a glossary or appendix explaining the present nomenclature for many of the dinosaurs discussed in the book. Frequent references are made to the sauropod Morosaurus, for example, which was considered a valid name at the turn of the 20th century but has since been synonymized with Camarasaurus. Those steeped in the esoterica of dinosaur paleontology will have no problem with such details, but other readers may be puzzled to see so many unfamiliar dinosaur names.

[Editor's Note: We have been informed by the author that an appendix on dinosaur classification IS included in the final copy. Our apologies for the mix-up and confusion.]

There are a few major gaps in the history of paleontology that, for one reason or another, have not yet merited a major investigation. Brinkman’s The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush has now filled in one of those gaps in a comprehensive and accessible manner. From daily camp life to museum politics, Brinkman has ably documented a time of major change in dinosaur science, one that provides the context for paleontology as we know it today.

A cross section of a generalized limb bone denoting the different structures. Fossil bone often preserves these internal structures, too. From Wikipedia.

When I was a child, one of my uncles gave me what he said was a real dinosaur bone. The little black object certainly looked like some sort of bone, and I kept it in my little collection of shark teeth and other fossils in my closest. After a while I almost completely forgot about it, but when I took a college course on dinosaurs I remembered the little thing. I took it to my professor to ask what kind of animal it might have come from.

It was not a fossil at all, my professor told me. The “dinosaur bone” was really a concretion, or a small lump of mineral that had formed around some bit of detritus. A broken part of the object made the identification easy. The exposed internal structure was compact, uniform, and smooth. It entirely lacked any sign of internal bone structure that a real dinosaur bone would exhibit.

Paleontologists respond to dozens of similar queries each year. Many people find concretions or vaguely bone-shaped rocks and bring them in to ask what kind of dinosaur the “bones” came from and if the museum would be interested in buying them. Needless to say, most of those people leave a bit disappointed that they have not uncovered the find of the century in their backyard, but these common experiences bring up a simple question: how can you tell fossil bone from stone?

There is no single hard-and-fast rule for distinguishing rock from bone, but there are a few principles that can definitely help you tell the difference. One of the simplest is that you need to know where to look for fossils. If you spot a “dinosaur egg” in the soil while mowing your lawn the chances are pretty good that is is just a rock. Real fossils will be found in particular rock formations which geological maps and even some state-specific booklets can help you identify. Before you grab your pick and shovel, though, you will have to familiarize yourself with the type of land those deposits are on and what the rules are about collecting fossils. If you just walk to a formation and pick out a fossil without filling out the right paperwork and being absolutely certain of where you are, you are probably breaking the law (not to mention the fact that trained paleontologists are much better qualified at properly documenting and excavating fossil sites).

But let’s assume that, regardless of how it was acquired, you have what you think is a piece of fossil bone. Out of its geologic context it is impossible to compare it to the surrounding rock (fossils are often different in color and smoother than rocks from the same deposit), but if there is a break on the specimen you may be able to check its internal structure. A rock or concretion, like the one I showed to my professor, will be solid, and the inside of the rock will look like the outside. Fossil bone, on the other hand, will probably preserve the internal bone structure. In a fossil bone you will be able to see the different canals and webbed structure of the bone, sure signs that the object was of biological origin. You can even try a tongue test. The porous nature of some fossil bones will cause it to slightly stick to your tongue if you lick it, though you might want to have a glass of water handy if you feel compelled to try this.

By following these guidelines it becomes easier to determine whether or not you have really found a fossil bone. It does not take a Ph.D. education; just some attention to detail and common sense.

The skeleton of Sinosauropteryx, complete with preserved feathers. From Wikipedia.

At one point or another, almost every general book about dinosaurs I have ever seen has said the same thing: we cannot know what color dinosaurs were. Scientists have found the skin impressions of some specimens, but as far as we know these traces contain nothing that might tell us what color those dinosaurs were. As described in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, however, scientists have been developing a technique that may allow us to see the colors displayed by some dinosaurs, and it is thanks to their connection with birds.

Last year the journal Biology Letters published the results of a study that identified preserved microstructures related to color in the feather of a fossil bird. The scientists could not say for sure what colors the feather exhibited in life, but they were able to document minute differences in the feather that are seen in living birds, meaning that evidence of color was preserved in the fossil even if it could not be fully understood yet. Now a different team of scientists has published a new study that has accomplished a similar task, but this time for two feathered dinosaurs and one of their bird relatives.

What the scientists behind the Nature study were looking for were melanosomes. These are color-carrying structures found inside pigment cells and are partially responsible for the colors we see in many organisms. The paleontologists found them in abundance in the feathers of the dinosaurs Sinosauropteryx and Sinonithosaurus, as well is in the preserved plumage of Confuciusornis. The structures were not preserved bacteria or some other remnant. Instead they were the preserved vestiges of dinosaur cell structure.

Clearly these animals had color-carrying cells in their feathers, but what color were they? That is a more difficult question to answer. The fossils that were examined contained two types of melanosomes: eumelanosomes and phaeomelanosomes. From the study of living organisms we know that eumelanosomes are associated with dark colors (i.e. black) while phaeomelanosomes are associated with lighter colors (i.e. yellowish to red). They cannot tell us specifically what color the dinosaurs were, but they can help us confirm color patterns and be used create hypotheses. The tail of Sinosauropteryx, for example, contains  bands of feathers stuffed with phaeomelanosomes, and so the authors of the new paper suggest that it might have had bands of rich, reddish tail feathers. This hypothesis will require more evidence to confirm, however, especially since scientists are still learning how melanosomes are involved in producing particular colors.

The new research is a step closer to understanding what colors some dinosaurs were, and it is another piece of evidence confirming that the structures preserved around dinosaurs like Sinosauropteryx and Sinornithosaurus really are feathers. The melanosomes are contained entirely inside the feathers, just like in living birds, and there no longer can be any reasonable doubt that these animals were feathered dinosaurs. Even better, this line of inquiry has only just begun, and perhaps in a few years we will be able to tell with greater certainty whether dinosaurs were as colorful as their living relatives.

Zhang, F., Kearns, S., Orr, P., Benton, M., Zhou, Z., Johnson, D., Xu, X., & Wang, X. (2010). Fossilized melanosomes and the colour of Cretaceous dinosaurs and birds Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature08740