Category: paleoart
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Plant paleoartists: an interview with Rebecca Dart
For the second installment of our interviews, we have Rebecca Dart, from Vancouver, Canada. Aside from her long and fruitful career in animation working in character design and art direction, she produces some of the most exciting and unique plant paleoart around. I hope you will find her perspective as fascinating and inspiring as I…
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Plant paleoartists: an interview with Pollyanna von Knorring
For this week, I have a new format for you readers. In my effort to spread the love for plant paleoart, I thought it would be interesting to ask a few questions to some of the most accomplished plant paleoartists, to learn about their approach to their art and the steps that led them to…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists VIII: Paleofloras of the Jurassic
Vertebrates (and particularly tetrapods) are the main focus of many paleoartistic reconstruction. This is perfectly understandable: humans tend to care more about things that are more similar to them, with decreasing interest for more distant living beings (see here). Unfortunately, given the different preservation potentials of the two groups, vertebrate localities are usually devoid of…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists VII: Aquatic Cretaceous angiosperms
In the previous post about early angiosperms, I discussed about many groups that are strongly underrepresented in paleoartistic reconstructions. For this second post on Early Cretaceous flowering plants, we will look at another group of angiosperms that were quite widespread at that time, namely water plants. Land plants evolved to occupy aquatic environments many times…
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A day in the Cretaceous of Patagonia
For today’s post, I want to show you an astounding piece of art I commissioned to Ida Kalsta, an extraordinary illustrator and artist. This represents an environment from the Early Cretaceous (Aptian, ~116 millions of years ago) of Patagonia, in particular the possible environment of the Ticoa harrisii fossiliferous layer in the Anfiteatro de Ticó…
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Forgotten formations: Anfiteatro de Ticó.
While doing some doomscrolling on Twitter, I came across this absolutely spectacular reconstruction of the Triassic Fremouw Formation by Liam Elward. The main focus of the piece are a couple of Lystrosaurus, but the attention to the flora of this formation is stunning. Many plants are known from the Fremouw formation, with many having been…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists VI: paleoart history and the Potomac Group
For this new post, I want to share a piece of paleoartistic history with you. This comes thanks to from James Doyle, a palaeobotanist with a long history of research in the Early Cretaceous and the origin of the angiosperms, who is now an emeritus at the University of California, Davis. In the 1970s, Jim…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists V: Early Angiosperms
Angiosperms in paleoart, especially in the Early Cretaceous, are often limited to familiar forms such as Nymphaeaceae (waterlilies) or magnolias. Although there is evidence of both groups in the Early Cretaceous fossil record, other groups of angiosperms were probably much more abundant across a range of environments during that period. The main example are Chloranthaceae,…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists IV: Mesozoic Seed Ferns
Another element which is often not represented in paleoart are the Mesozoic “seed ferns”. This is an umbrella term for plants with different affinities united by the fact that they were seed plants with fern-like, often pinnate leaves. Though ‘seed fern’ groups were rather abundant in the Paleozoic, quite a few grew among the Mesozoic…
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Palaeobotany for Paleoartists III: Fossil Gnetales
Here is the third part of my Paleobotany for Paleoartists series, dedicated to a less well-known group that was however very successful during the Early Cretaceous: the Gnetales. Extant Gnetales are comprised of three highly distinc genera, namely Ephedra, Gnetum, and Welwtischia. This last species is probably the most well known, mostly because of its…
Mario Coiro 