Mario Coiro

Today the Extinct Plants Paleoart reference database officially launches, together with its official twitter account.

This project started from the observation that while animal paleoart is thriving, with more and more artists generating great work with increased attention to accuracy, plant paleoart does not receive the same amount of attention. Though part of this can be seen as a byproduct of a general ‘plant blindness’, another major obstacle to this is the lack of good references for the artist to take inspiration in recreating fossil plants. For this reason, together with Nathan Jud, and with the help of Andres Elgorriaga, Ezequiel Vera and others, we have built a database to host references to plant reconstructions that can be used as a starting point for paleoartists to improve their reconstruction of extinct plants.

The database is hosted on GitHub and everyone can contribute with new references. We hope this will help paleoartists and science communicators to combat fossil plant blindness, and look forward to seeing the database grow!