99% Invisible #439 (14 Apr 2021): Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux
Rerun of a show from 2018. In the present-day into, Roman and someone talk about how even though we can recite that 90% of an iceberg is underwater, we tend to picture that stuff being mostly below the stuff above it, like an ice cream cone, when actually it’s a lot more spread out. Drawings can make this sort of thing much more intuitive. They mention a website where you can draw a 2d iceberg shape, and it’ll show you how it would orient itself.
For a long time people thought dinosaurs were slow and cold-blooded. They’d picture brontosaurus and diplodocus standing in swamps to help support their body mass. Evidence comes along suggesting they were warm-blooded and at least some of them were fast.
Bob (Barker?) writes an article defending this, and draws a picture of a dinosaur running, and this sets off a wave of other people drawing dinosaurs doing stuff and thinking of dinosaurs as fast and exciting things. Jurassic Park (the movie, book isn’t mentioned) is part of this.
But most depictions still assume dinosaurs are basically just what we can derive from the skeletons. You can’t figure out the shape of a whale or a camel or an elephant from its skeleton, so you probably can’t do it with a dinosaur either. Three things happen in I don’t remember what order:
We find a dinosaur with some of its softer tissues preserved, and it had quills, maybe feathers?
A book comes out, All Yesterdays, with pictures of “we can’t rule out that this is what this dinosaur looked like”.
That kind of thing becomes more accepted, as long as you make it clear that it’s “we can’t rule this out” not “this is what we know”. E.g. you might draw a triceratops with a nose balloon because that’s what the big nostrils might be good for.
Also, after All Yesterdays comes All Todays, where people take skeletons (sometimes partial skeletons) of modern day animals and do the All Yesterdays thing to them.
99% Invisible #439 (14 Apr 2021): Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux
Rerun of a show from 2018. In the present-day into, Roman and someone talk about how even though we can recite that 90% of an iceberg is underwater, we tend to picture that stuff being mostly below the stuff above it, like an ice cream cone, when actually it’s a lot more spread out. Drawings can make this sort of thing much more intuitive. They mention a website where you can draw a 2d iceberg shape, and it’ll show you how it would orient itself.
For a long time people thought dinosaurs were slow and cold-blooded. They’d picture brontosaurus and diplodocus standing in swamps to help support their body mass. Evidence comes along suggesting they were warm-blooded and at least some of them were fast.
Bob (Barker?) writes an article defending this, and draws a picture of a dinosaur running, and this sets off a wave of other people drawing dinosaurs doing stuff and thinking of dinosaurs as fast and exciting things. Jurassic Park (the movie, book isn’t mentioned) is part of this.
But most depictions still assume dinosaurs are basically just what we can derive from the skeletons. You can’t figure out the shape of a whale or a camel or an elephant from its skeleton, so you probably can’t do it with a dinosaur either. Three things happen in I don’t remember what order:
We find a dinosaur with some of its softer tissues preserved, and it had quills, maybe feathers?
A book comes out, All Yesterdays, with pictures of “we can’t rule out that this is what this dinosaur looked like”.
That kind of thing becomes more accepted, as long as you make it clear that it’s “we can’t rule this out” not “this is what we know”. E.g. you might draw a triceratops with a nose balloon because that’s what the big nostrils might be good for.
Also, after All Yesterdays comes All Todays, where people take skeletons (sometimes partial skeletons) of modern day animals and do the All Yesterdays thing to them.