Palaeo Art - Tumblr Posts
I want to recommend the blog (and podcast) Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs here; they review old palaeo art, yes from the perspective of modern scientific knowledge, but also from an artistic perspective.
It's also important to remember that at the time, a lot of the dinosaur and palaeo art that seems outdated now was scientifically cutting edge at the time;
The Crystal Palace sculptures may be outdated, but they are still rad!
It's also one of the few fields where it's very easy to see the progression of scientific knowledge through time, which is really cool to see itself!
I know they’re technically correct and all but every time I see paleo bloggers just snarking on and pointing out all the flaws in incorrect dinosaur art like it’s wacky and silly I just feel bad for the artists, who were usually doing the absolute best they could with the best knowledge available at the time :( ……and it’s not like museums have infinite budget to update every model and animatronic. Besides, we may now know they had feathers or they stood differently but no matter how much we learn about them, they’re never actually going to be right as long as we can’t see a living one in person. They will always just be imaginary approximations of something nobody has ever seen. Give artists some slack and flexibility!
Happy Velociraptor Awareness Day!
also watch the prehistoric planet season 2 teaser
Old animation of a fluffy boi waking up from a nap I did a few months ago
holy SHIT please read the whole thread and many more of these images right here, this artist put together an updated Opabinia reconstruction where every single one of these minute details (except coloration, obviously) are fully sourced making this most likely the first depiction factoring in 100% of current knowledge about it. Even I didn’t know it had little feet like a velvet worm and could have walked around on them! I never knew exactly how the trunk is oriented or how many “teeth” it is! I especially didn’t know the mouth was that weird! And I kind of assumed this since it’s a lobopod and all, but the whole animal was soft and squishy except for the eyes and the teeth. It did not have armor plates or a jointed exoskeleton like a lot of people portray. This also means all five of the eyes would have been able to bend and look around independently! The eye structure in fossils also indicates that they would have PSEUDOPUPILS! That’s the pupil-like dot in the eyes of insects like mantises!
Today's random portfolio artwork is a life-size model of a small Arthropleura (40cm long – they grew to 250cm long), which I built for MUSE – the Science Museum of Trento, in 2014.