Dinosaurs as Art: Royal Tyrrell Museum

Back from the Badlands

The Royal Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller was more than I had imagined it to be. I have grown up with the Royal Ontario Museum; I took classes there as a child, and have been a frequent visitor since. The R.O.M. specialises in many areas, from ancient China & prehistoric animals to modern bats, & art. When constructing its new dinosaur gallery inside the Crystal, the R.O.M. would do well to pay attention to the wealth of uncompromising science and education about evolution at the Tyrrell. No concessions made to offending any religious sensibililties, just facts and supported theories, evidence in abundance, pure science.

The Tyrrell has a narrower, and richer focus. Prehistoric life. Evolution. The world of what happened before us.



Above, left: Golden Eagle claw with Sauronitholestes. Above, right: The sickle-claws of a dromeosaur, ornithomimus & velociraptor.

The pictures I am blogging today are from my favourite room; a Gallery, shrouded in darkness, reverent spotlights revealing the detail and majesty of the fossils. Ornate gold frames, in the baroque-style, encased the larger specimens. Simple North-Renaissance black frames with black-velvet mats added subtle lushness to the sophisticated evolved claws, teeth and feet of swift-moving dinosaurs.

Above, an Albertosaurus caught in a dramatic rigor mortis pose.

A struthiomimus.

The majestic Tyrannosaurus. Mounted without frames or hyperbole.


Perhaps this room appeals to me so much because of my Fine Art background. When I oil paint, I begin on a black or dark background, adding paint and the figures emerge from the darkness, much as this room brought to life. Bravo and thank you to the curator.

I believe one of the greatest experiences of my life was first entering this room. Seeing the magnificent creatures of the past I have loved so much, through the lense of the human art world was sublime, and I felt the rush of the scientifically-numinous.

Dinosaur Provincial Park

Back from the Badlands
After our visit to the Three Rivers Rock & Fossil Museum, my hunger for more fossils grew. I wanted to see bigger ones, jutting out of rock. I'd heard about Dinosaur Provincial Park even as a kid, (didn't the Polka Dot Door do an episode once?) I wen hoping to see a parasaurolophus skull grinning out of the sandy matrix.

It was a long and beautiful drive out from Calgary. All of the sudden, the lightly rolling hills drop away, and we were in the Badlands proper.

We'd just made it, and hopped on board the 24-seater painted schoolbus, and our guide Eric sprayed misty water on us, claiming it was air conditioning.

He drove out to one of his two favourite spots, and as we got off the bus, he pointed out a femur in the dirt parking spot. It seemed so staged just laying there right where he parked the bus. Boy, was I wrong! We all sat down on some banana-coloured pieces of foam. There was a brief group lesson, everyone looking at small fossils of the kind we were likely to see. Crocodile teeth, scutes from crocodiles or euplocephalosaurus, herbivore teeth, femurs and a great many more.

We swore the One Finger Oath, and were shown how to do the lick-test to identify fossil bone. If you lick your finger, and press it hard against a suspected fossil, the tiny pores in the stony bone will create suction. We walked a few more paces, and the fossils were literally littering the ground underfoot. The picture at left shows a breathtaking lichen encrusted stone sitting on shattered manganese. The stone is likely a fossil, but it was so pretty I didn't lick my finger to test it out.

Our guide Eric was terrific. He spent a lot of time with the children, who eagerly tried to show off to him what they had found in a constant stream. Finding a large shattered femur, bulbous and amazing, I wanted to show off to him too, and grabbed his attention for a few moments. As I'd pass by, wandering on our little exploratory hill, I heard him say one of my favourite phrases for a scientist; "Wow. I don't know what that is, but I'm gonna have to find out". He said it more than once. This is education, kids.

This was one of the most incredibly exalting experiences I've ever had, just exploring this hill in a tiny section of the park. At right is another exposed femur, possibly some kind of hadrosaur. Could it be the parasaurolophus I had sought? It could. Nearby was a covered, partially-excavated spine and ribcage for our viewing pleasure.

Dinosaur Provincial Park is also famous for its centrosaurus beds. Centrosaurus, a ceratopsian with a very pretty head-shield can be found in abundance.

The park is an offshoot of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and more excavated wonders awaited us inside. The displays were heavy on information, and uncompromisingly scientific. Exhausted, the day only half gone by, it was the morning of a lifetime. The thrill of amateur, touristic discovery was rewarding and left me flush with wonder.

Three Rivers Rock & Fossil Museum

Back From the Badlands

While staying at a gorgeous cabin with an amazing view near Pincher Creek, Alberta, this Ontario-born blogger got to see a local treat. Spying an ad in a five year old tourist-attraction booklet, we called ahead to see if the Three Rivers Rock & Fossil Museum was still open for business. It boasted Canada's largest collection of cephalopods. I just had to go.

On the way there, we speculated what it would be like. It sounded like a small collection, and I wondered if it would be in someone's living room. I was wrong. At the time we arrived we were the only visitors. And we stumbled into an insidious Garden Gnome Invasion. They were everywhere! My heart raced at the thought of seeing fossilized remains of early gnominids. Painting ideas were coming to mind.

The gentlemen and collector greeted us out in the winding, tree-lined front yard, obviously in league with the garden gnomes all around. Being from Toronto, it's easy to forget how large these rural Alberta properties are. We did not head for his living room; we headed to a building behind the house. The gnomes followed, I'm sure of it. Waiting to pounce.

The treaty the owner had with the gnomes was still holding. They did not enter.

Once inside, it was clear the declaration of "largest cephalopod collection in Canada" was no idle boast. There were tons of them! Check out the ammolite specimen above. Ammolite is the semi-precious "stone" interior of ancient ammonites, like mother-of-pearl, but sometimes with startling red tones shot throughout. The owner gave us a bit of information, then sat down at a desk and let us look. Each glass case held a myriad of early life forms or minerals, all hand labelled with a description and location.

At left is a pretty geode, larger than your fist. Looks like marshmallow, doesn't it?

Mmmmm....tasty geode....

I love minerals like this. The little 'hairs' on the puffball-looking formation are so tiny, it challenges the eye to pick them out.

There were shark's teeth, plant fossils, fish fossils, and enough coprolite to keep my five year old nephew entertained (at least after we told him it's dinosaur poop).

The collection is well worth the drive out of the way for any fossil enthusiast or person looking for a spot to take the family. It is a private collection however, and I would strongly recommend asking permission before taking photos, as I have done. It's polite. Rural Alberta has a bit of a reputation for being conservative, at least with Ontarians, and it was nice to see an entire museum devoted to fossils instead of fundamentalism.

Of course there are abundant trilobite fossils, even if they were outnumbered by the ancient predatory cephalopods. Here is Mr. Jumbo, a whopper of a fossil about 60 cm long. This beautiful trilobite is easily more than a match for the gnomes outside, and no wonder they did not enter the building. Is that some sort of iron-rich mineral giving it a rusty appearance? I wonder. A little sea scorpion and ammonite sit submissively beneath the pygidium of this prehistoric royalty.

There are a few tiny fossils and mineral jewellry for purchase, nothing as grand as what's in the collection. I bought a nice little brachiopod, and left the Three Rivers Rock & Fossil Museum with my appetite for prehistoric wonder whetted for more.

We left the militant gnomes behind.

Back from the Badlands

I'm back from my family holiday in Alberta. The land was so starkly different from Ontario, I simply gawked out of my window for much of my trip. Mountains gliding across the distant horizons. Electric yellow-green canola fields commanding the eye. Gorgeous white windmills silently thrumming in the fields, often lined up to catch an invisble corridor of kinetic power for kilometers at a time.

Every once in a while, the land sloping sharply downward through a layered cake of every shade of beige and rust toward a riverbed that may or may not have water at the bottom. And may or may not contain fossils sprinkled throughout.

I have a lot I wish to blog about the trip. A very warm thanks to my travelling companions, and to our gracious hosts, my wife's cousins' and aunt & uncle, for all the fun and more travelling than was reasonable to indulge this paleo-nerd in looking for things millions of years old.

Over the next few weeks, likely topics I will blog include:

• The Three Rivers Fossil Museum near Pincher Creek
• Dinosaur Provincial Park
• Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum
• Invertebrates at the Royal Tyrrell Museum
• Sketches from my trip
• A Brief Book Review of The Boy on the Back of the Turtle by Paul Quarrington
  
  (And no, I did not stop at the museum about creationism. With the riches of the past all over Alberta, and the fun of family, I did not ask to sully paradise.)
  
  Back from the Badlands, baby!
  
  

Just a spoonful of Mamenchisaurus to help the medicine go down!

Pachycephalosaurus: overlooked source to cure gout, pinkeye, and disobedient children?

Yahoo News has reported that central Chinese villagers from the Henan province have been grinding up dinosaur fossils and using them as traditional medicine to cure dizziness and leg cramps. Their belief has been that the calcium-rich fossils are dragon bones.

And here's the good news. The scientist who reported this story, Dong Zhiming, also said that once the villagers found out what it was they were consuming, they stopped. Someone please, please fly this man to a certain 'museum' in Kentucky! His powers of persuasion must be truly awesome.

Really though. Folkloric animal-based medicines like shark-cartilege and tiger penises have been persuasive medicines for the desperate, the traditional, and the New Age set for, well, since prehistory, I would guess. And I think the two easiest ways to spot a false cure are 1. when it cures a disparate set of ailments, such as the "dizziness & leg cramps", or 2. when it cures something suspiciously too-related to what body part it is from, like tiger penis for sexual dysfunction. Makes me suspicious. Oh yeah, and lack of double-blind empirical testing is not a good sign either.

Good for these folks though. Stopped drinking dinosaur-calcium soup straight away. Perhaps last month's Seed magazine was right, and China is successfully pushing its science-based agenda thoughout the country. Hm.

The Flying Trilobite happily recommends Dinobase for an excellent source of dinosaur related science. And, next week, my wife and I will be visiting family in Alberta! I hope to produce more dinosaur sketches like the one above while I am there. Any of this blog's readers out in Calgary?

Trilobite Tree

I have always loved drawing trees, mainly leafless as in winter, with their ever-shrinking sizes of branch. A few times in the past, I have used a tree to outline a silhouette. I drew this trilobite shape in the branches as a challenge to myself when I was inaugerating a new Moleskine sketchbook I had bought.

It is loosely based on Elrathia, as many of my drawings are. I have some affection for that species. I think they look the most recognisable and iconic, if you will, of the trilobite types. I also have a wee one inset in a ring my wife gave me one Valentine's Day. I always try and remember to draw 13 pleurae, though in this tree, those were blown off in a windstorm. (That's my story...they blew right off-panel, so don't bother looking. The branches crushed someone's SUV, too.)

The moon is an enrolled trilobite, as the head evokes that crescent shape, and because I love it, there is an eye in the knot of the tree, a Symbolist influence. I drew this with an HB .3mm lead and copious use of a kneadable eraser, since they don't leave those annoying eraser bits. The mushroom is not there to suggest anything, it's just for atmosphere, much like the grass. (Hmmm...that last statement didn't come out too well.) Years ago, in my University days, one of my fellow students kept insisting I had to be taking drugs to come up with my imagery. I hadn't, and still don't (I don't even drink alcohol, I just have lots of coffee) and since then this has been a personal badge of honour. My artwork may look like I'm on drugs, but I'm getting by on my own ideas and hard work.

Glimpses of Crystal: Royal Ontario Museum

Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum has been in the process of expanding. And I'm an unabashed fan of the redesign.

My wife got us memberships last Christmas, and it's been neat to watch the process. There is a wealth of artifacts that are rarely if ever on display, and the ROM wanted to show them off...and add some striking new architecture to the city. Last night, we had tickets to wander around the new, mostly empty galleries. There were surprises.

The new Lee-Chin Crystal was designed by Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind, initially on a napkin (at right). The original facade of the ROM, facing east is classic, sculpted architecure, very detailed stonework. The new design on the north end is as if gigantic geode crystals had formed out of the original stone. If you stand to the southeast, you see only the classic building I grew up with. Standing at the northwest, the Crystal dominates the street and demands attention.

History of History
Inside, we were taken in a gigantic elevator to the fourth floor. The suggestion was to start at the top, and head down. The first exhibit was an art show designed and curated by Hiroshi Sugimoto. It was an interesting show, of the kind I like; the narratives on the wall explained the works to an extent, but were only placed in soft greys, so if you wanted to merely examine the art and artifacts you could. At the beginning were some truly awesome trilobites, among other fossils. Most of the show was about photography, and the explanation on the wall suggested that fossils are pre-photography, prehistoric snapshots into the past. It was an interesting idea on the surface, and a beautiful idea to put fossils under a photo-centric ideal. But I couldn't help wondering, as we looked at the rest of the very staged and beautiful photo-artifact pieces, wouldn't a camera hurtling through downtown Montreal, or the coral reefs of Aruba taking undirected snapshots be more like a fossil?

(photo of opening ceremony fireworks)

The Crystal
Words like 'lofty' and 'soaring' come to mind. I believe the space is designed to promote reflective thought. But words like 'intimate', 'peeking', and 'glimpse' also come to mind. There are beautiful shafts of natural light filtering onto new shiny structure and original stone. Viewing through the levels is intentionally partially obstructed and therefore intriguing.

Surprising Stairs
The Driscoll Stair of Wonder caught us delightfully off guard. We went down the flight from the fourth to third, and a giant whimsical wall of antique toy soldiers greeted us. Around the next flight, beautiful insects, glass paperweights and seashells glittered. The next, birds with extravagant plumage, Victorian glass finger bowls, and jars of small animals in formaldehyde. The final stair to the basement featured mammal weaponry; narwhal tusks, antlers of all kinds...The whole stairway was a happy surprise.

Over the next few months, the ROM will continue to unveil more & more. (Trilobites & invertebrates in 2009!) I'm loving it.

(Both images above are credited to the Royal Ontario Museum website.)

Random News & Made-Up Hominid

-The Flying Trilobite is now on Fish Feet's blogroll!

Fish Feet is a fascinating site by Sarda Sahney, and she has added The Flying Trilobite to her blogroll. Sharks and Tyrannosaurs! Sweet!

-Next, may I introduce our drawing this evening, a made-up hominid I drew when I really felt like drawing some sciency (sciencish?) anatomy. Note the nifty cranial ridge for enlarged jaw muscles. It was fun to smudge the graphite for the skin on the lower left and draw really tight lines for the muscles next to it. Juxtoposition plays with you.

-While reading the May 21st 2007, edition of Maclean's today I note with sadness that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is sadly, no longer in their Top Ten Non-Fiction. Yes, lads & lasses, hang ye heads low. Lower. Ok stop.
Maclean's is kind of like Canada's answer to Time magazine, and I have been agreeing or disagreeing with their articles very strongly, which is what I look for in a magazine. The God Delusion hung on to a Top Ten spot for at least 28 weeks here in the Great White North.

-In other news, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens has debuted at #1 on the Maclean's Top Ten Bestsellers, Non-Fiction. Way to carry that torch! Check out an exclusive excerpt here at Slate Magazine online.

-For fans of astronomy, I have been fascinated all week by a few pictures from the Cassini probe of a strange hexagon cloud system on the pole of Saturn. It's so creepily hexagonal, I'm sure conspiracy theories will run rampant over this. My vote is that the Saturnians are harboring weapons of mass destruction. Check it out over at the Jet Propulsion Labs' site.

Ammonite Vs Trilobite

Recently, PZ Myers who runs the popular science blog Pharyngula ran a call for new entries to his popular blogroll. The Flying Trilobite is now one of Prof. Myers' multitude. (or at least will be soon....so far the new entries have not yet been added to the roll itself...see the announcement here.)

I thought it was fitting then, to display this painting I did last year of an ammonite attacking a trilobite. Y'see, Prof. Myers has this affinity with cephalopods...

This work is an oil on canvas, and hangs with a group of my pieces, including My Life With Trilobites. Quniacradone orange is one of my favourite earthy tones.

You might be thinking, "poor, cute li'l trilobite". The trilobite stepped on the ammonite's shell, and kinda scuffed it. The ammonite then snapped the trilobite's shell in half. "A shell for a shell", is the kind of prehistoric, savage morals these ancient creatures lived by. I'm so glad we are past that kind of thinking on this planet.

You may now roll your eyes.

Fossil Hunters at Pigeon Lake

While out at our good friends' cottage on Pigeon Lake, Ontario, my five-year old nephew and I went for a walk. These days he's always picking up rocks. Since there is a lot of shale on the beach there, I suggested we look for fossils.

A few minutes later, and bingo! My nephew has his first fossil. Our hosts were gracious enough to let us keep it.

It appears to be a shell, and it looks similar to a cockle, perhaps like a small specimen of Acrosterigma? (Thank you, Dorling Kindersley handbooks!) Trying to identify it together at home was half the fun.

The Forever Painting

In my first post, I included a picture of a rough sketch for a piece I call The Forever Painting. Here is an image of the final work itself. The overall dimensions are approximately 32" x 68".

Although I have painted in watercolour in the past, I now paint in oil. I like to work with a dark ground, usually black or burnt umber. I enjoy how the figures seem to step out of the darkness as I paint.

This canvas was originally an acrylic painting I had done for studio class in university. I had rushed it and never liked it. One summer, in a dark mood, I took that acrylic painting, and some ivory black, and just painted over it. I never get rid of artwork, and this act of catharsis felt refreshing and exciting.

I spent the next two and a half years working on The Forever Painting, off and on. This image plays with a bridging of themes for me. It's hard to see in this tiny reproduction, but I painted a few fossils in the stone. During university, I used Rapa Nui (Easter Island) statues as a motif in many of my drawings. Here, they are also topped by candles, and the one on the left is broken. There is a winged trilobite, surrounded by smoke from the right candle. There is also a DNA candle, an image I often use (a candle with a wick made out of a double-helix, as an image of mortality).

The Forever Painting for me is about what lingers. The people of Rapa Nui are gone, the trilobites extinct, DNA telomeres shorten and burn in the candle, beauty can fade; but this painting shows the immortal bits, the fossils, the guardian statues, the double-helix, the echo of beauty.