Science, art and the wonder of it all.

Sun and rain in the Wessex Formation.
© Stu Pond 2012.

It’s a cold, windy day in mid-February, and I have stowed by trusty Donegal tweed flat cap in the pocket of my jacket and I am tightening the hood against the coming rain, the first spots of which are falling around me now. As I look to the north I watch as the chalk cliffs become enveloped by a translucent wall of grey; the full force of the weather will be upon me within minutes. Hopefully it’s just a squall, but it looks bigger than that.

I have waded across a shallow, narrow channel, startling several loitering Oystercatchers in the process to what is presently a small islet off the coast of the island. Too impatient to wait for the tide to fall I crossed the gap carefully, trying to avoid a boot full of the murky, freezing English Channel by short-stepping through the water and hopping across seaweed-coated rocks. Plenty of places to look for bone here, but that’s not why I’m drawn to this place once again.

The rain starts in earnest and I look down at the rock I am standing on. The deep red clays erode quickly on this part of the coast, a reminder of the transient nature even of the very geology under our feet, the turning of the wheel of deep time. A yard or so from where I stand is the impression of large tridactyl footprint sunken into the rock surface, and I can see two more striding away towards the south-east. A dinosaur walked here. I’m not noticing the wind and rain for the moment, although as the afternoon wears on it’s presence will become ever more immediate. In my mind’s eye I am standing on a broad mud bank on the edge of a streams which itself is part of a large braided river system. To the west there is the hint of highlands on the far horizon, but that might be the cloud, or possibly the smoke from the wildfires that occur here and in the hinterland during the dry season. It’s hot and humid and though the streams still flow at present as the season wears on some will dry up, as will the ponds and oxbows in the surrounding land. However, for now the streams are for the most part shallow enough to wade; if you’re a dinosaur that is.

Something makes me turn back, a noise perhaps, or that six sense the ecology of fear seems to awake within possible prey, and suddenly she is there. A 4.5 metre theropod dinosaur is walking towards me, head bobbing from side to side and eyes glittering with awareness and a birdlike intelligence. Her three-toed feet are sinking into the soft mud but she is moving with purpose, and as she passes close to me I can hear her steady breathing, see the landscape reflected in her eyes, a landscape she feels completely at one with. Her walk is the walk of predator, relaxed and self-assured, fully alive to her surroundings. She passes close enough for me to touch, and I see her scarred snout, the tuft of feathers on the crown of her head, the hide of her flanks scaly but fantastically patterned, and I notice her colouration which match the scale patterning in may places. She halts a few strides on, sniffs the air and walks on into a future long passed. I am back in the present; the rain stings my face, and I get my camera and field notebook out and get to work.

Rewind five months and I’m standing in the Warner Valley, Utah. It’s still only mid-morning but the sun is getting hot, and as I stare out across the sagebrush and creosote I can’t discern the presence of man in the landscape. Behind me spectacular red cliffs rise and march away to the north-west, but here at their feet lies a treasure beyond price. Here too are the tracks of a large theropod dinosaur, as well as the tracks of many smaller bipedal dinosaurs and a lone four-toed ornithischian. These criss-cross trackways indicate a busy spot for dinosaurs, probably a river system that stretched across several states and was bordered in the north-east by a mighty erg, a sand sea that also contains evidence of dinosaur activity. On a warm, dry, bright morning like this it isn’t too hard to imagine small theropod dinosaurs skittering around your feet as they hunt for insects and small animals, their birdlike chattering filling the air as they speed off into the distance. We’ll be heading off in a few minutes to another site, to another time.

This is why I love science. For myself, like so many others it evokes wonder and awe and confers a continuing sense of amazement, and the more you learn the more you understand when you look; the world we live in becomes a palimpsest that with the right tools can be read, deciphered and comprehended. Standing in the cold wind with horizontal rain driving into your face might not be everybody’s idea of fun, but for me the footprints I stand next to fill me with emotion; they are a tangible connection between me and the animal that made them, a meeting of two distinct species across the vastness of time, walking on the same surface as each other. It’s a fleeting moment of oneness in the universe, the unimaginable infinity of time and space. Here is actual behavior, an animal caught in the act of doing something definite, with intent and with awareness. And here I am too, and that dinosaur is as close as the back of a shadow.

I am convinced science and art are the soulmates of human endeavor, the two things that are the best qualities of us as a species. Like science, art is the pursuit of fundamental truth, and one complements the other. We need to send artists to the moon, poets to the ISS, musicians to the deeps of the oceans.  Science and art are explorers of both the outer and inner worlds; they are the interface between the two in so many ways. We can reveal the incredible complexity of science through the beauty only seeing can convey, through the verses poets fashion that stir something within us, to the intuitive, emotional understanding only music can communicate. This is why I love art.

Science, like art, is also capable of revealing things about ourselves and the universe we are part of in ways that both delight and inform. Often in the pursuit of science I am filled with wonder, a profound and deep sense of being part of something bigger than being me, of being connected to some vastness, intangible to me perhaps, but ultimately explicable. Of course that something is the fact we are the universe made conscious, curious about itself and filled with awe and questions as it contemplate its own existence. Art is the only other endeavor that creates this condition within humans.  From the birth of young stars in distant nebulae to the chiton clinging onto a fossil bone fragment plucked from a rockpool, this sense of wonder is enhanced by the fact the universe observable and we can formulate and test hypotheses, hopefully understanding the processes which enable our existence, the universe and all it contains existence, its processes. Like art, it illuminates our inner selves, and makes the abstract tangible.

I pack up my camera and field notebook and look around. It’s raining hard now, and the falling tide has made the trip back a tad easier as I don’t have to negotiate the shallows and risk a booty. I take a last glance at the tracks, knowing that next time I’m on the island I will be drawn here once more to see the prints, feel the presence of the animal. To make the connection. I’ve a few hours left before the tide comes in, and I head off southwards with the storm lashing at my back, and lightness in my heart. I’ve been walking in the company of dinosaurs, and it feels really, really good.

Threads in deep time; reconnecting with who we are.

Scott Sampson, a dinosaur palaeontologist at Utah University is a man who thinks big. Very big in fact, as in his latest post over at his blog The Whirlpool of Life Scott discusses how we need to reconnect emotionally as well as intellectually with our place in the story of the evolution of not only life on our planet, but the evolution of the universe itself. He suggests we can each find our own thread that links us back to where we are and where we have come from in deep time and we can do this now, in the very locality we are at any one moment.

I picked up Scott's book Dinosaur Odyssey in Border's bookstore in Chicago last year, as Mrs Stu and I were on our way back to the UK after our week in the field in North Dakota and Montana. In the book, Scott uses dinosaurs as an example of how the flows of both information (evolution) and and energy ecology create into the web of life, how this web has changed from the almost unimaginable depths of deep time to the present day. The importance of food webs, the metabolism of dinosaurs and the role of technology is all discussed to illustrate this complex, remarkable and fascinating subject. It's a holistic view of dinosaur evolution and does of course, have real relevance for us as a species as the book demonstrates; it's also beautifully illustrated.

Scott's book struck a real chord with me because it was close to a subject I had been thinking about for a long time. Many years ago I was reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and (I've lost the book so this is a paraphrase) one passage really made an impression. Sagan suggests that if at the very least we are nothing more that biological machines, if our thoughts, memories and characters are nothing more than the firing of synapses and release of signalling proteins in the brain and if consciousness itself is explicable and ultimately quantifiable the at the very least we are the universe made conscious. We are the universe recognising itself and contemplating it's true nature (I think the great philosopher Alan Watts first suggested this idea but that quote eludes me too - sorry). This deeply profound insight has been with me ever since I came across it in Sagan's book.

See them galaxies? That's you, that is.

Interacting Galaxy Pair Arp 87. Image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

To my mind the Sagan/Watts view provides answers to many questions. Firstly, it provides the basis for a firm moral framework that religions suggest atheist philosophy lacks, namely that every human life is unimaginably precious as it is the universe itself and this is such a profound fact that to cause intentional suffering to our fellow humans is a transgression from the natural order.

Next, if you take away this anthropocentric bias and apply this to all living things existing in their various states of consciousness, then we soon realise how precious and valuable everything that shares our planet with us is. The web of life Scott so brilliantly illustrates in his book is a part of us and we are a part of it, which is exactly what Scott suggests in his blog.

Like Scott Sampson I'm of the opinion we can and should reconnect emotionally with our sense of being and our sense of belonging in the natural order; concepts which science allows us to explore, give context to and perhaps one day understand fully. I think we all have that sense of something larger than us is at work in the universe; some people think it might be a creator or a supreme being (or several) and religion is a product of that recognition but for those of us for whom religion doesn't provide the answer how can we address this feeling? In it's search for truth science understands already that we are indeed part of something larger than us that we recognise through intuition and emotional connection as well as through intellectual inquiry. Books and blogs like Scott's and the work of other scientists and philosophers can give us a glimpse of the awe we feel when confronted with the grandeur and majesty of the natural world - from pulsars to protists, nebulae to nudibranchs, superstrings to sauropods.

A long-lost relative in the Lower Lias of North Yorkshire, UK.

But wait! This is a paleo art blog is it not? Well the arts are themselves an expression of our sense of being. The visual arts (such as paleo art) are as much a part of this broad and wonderful outpouring of human consciousness and creativity as anything else. As I argued in a previous post, it is desirable that some paleo art should transcend simply scientific representation and strive to express the essence of the life we are depicting, simply because we can. We are so connected to our subject (in our case palaeontology and ancient life) that we should allow ourselves to connect emotionally with what we are illustrating and in fact it might be essential to a degree; a part of our nature we cannot and should not suppress to much. My day job consists of depicting the internal mechanisms of the human body down to molecular level and this often requires a high degree of scientific accuracy, but it also leaves some room for creative licence within any given rationale (even the most utterly straight representation of data will require some interpretation by the artist). This is what I will be striving for on my journey into the art of palaeontology, my way of connecting with what Stephen J. Gould called "the old ones".

The Celts of these islands had a particular reverence for certain spots in the landscape such as springs, wells, rocks and trees and they believed (and many still do) these were inhabited by spirits particular to that specific location; the roman invaders called these spirits genius loci, the spirit of place. As Scott so eloquently argues, it is by discovering our own genius loci we can, through science and art reconnect with our own story and pick up our own very personal thread in the web of life and the universe.

Paleo Art or Scientific Illustration?

One of the most interesting issues I've come across in the paleoart blogsphere is the question of whether pictures of dinosaurs are art or science, and whether it's reasonable to illustrate dinosaurs in any way apart from using the latest science. Of course, accessing the latest science has become a bit of a hot topic recently and anyone following the lively and passionate discussions that followed Greg Paul's announcement that he wanted people to stop using his skeletal reconstructions will understand many people hold the subject of paleoart very close to their hearts.

But what about the actual function of palaeoart; purely scientific representation or could it be entertainment too? Could it go deeper than simply illustrating past life (not that this is actually a simple task) and illuminate some of the less quantifiable aspects of being a living being on our planet?


The image at the top of this post is actually from one of my sketchbooks. I had just acquired a rather natty brush pen and was experimenting with the strokes and assessing the quality of line, opacity of the ink etc. At some point I doodled this comic-book version of a large angry theropod, very loosely based on Tyrannosaurus rex and not ever meant to be seen by anyone. At the time, I was doing some pitch work for the BBC and had created a look I thought might work with and add something to this image. I scanned the sketch in, loaded it up in Photoshop and off I went. This was the result; a sort of deconstructionist take on dinosaur art with a nod to Frank Miller. I quite liked it, stuck it on my work website and got a positive reaction to the image from several people and so it stayed up. However, one thing always did bother me slightly about it - it simply wasn't accurate. It was never really meant to be, but did this matter? After all, I was more after the 'spirit of theropod'* than an actual reconstruction. 

Andrea Cau has argued in his excellent blog Theropda that the representation of dinosaurs in art should be purely scientific, that anything else is essentially a work of fantasy and imagination and should not be called paleoart. His superb The Decalogue of Paleoart lays out his view of what paleoart should be and for most of this I agree unreservedly; as paleo-artists our job is to communicate what we know about dinosaurs and other ancient life in a form that is easily understood and devoid of jargon so lay people can understand it (David Maas comments on the same post here and it's worth a read as Andrea clarifies some his points in the subsequent discussion). However, two of the Ten Commandments of Paleoart got me thinking:

VII - Do not create mythology 

VIII - Do not create false reconstruction

Hold on a moment - these two points are of course closely related in a sense. I can understand the mythology thing to a degree, perpetuating old myths and tropes (dragging sauropod tails etc) but am not so sure about "do not create false reconstruction"?  Even given the vagaries of Google Translate's sometimes eccentric interpretations this seems clear: Do not depict dinosaurs in any way except with complete scientific accuracy. Now, I don't actually disagree with this as for paleoart to be of value it must be done properly. If you're illustration for a paper, journal or media project then you've got to get your hands dirty and do the research and make sure what you're producing is scientifically accurate - a scientific illustration. But . . .

. . . art is not science. It's a creative as well as technical process and regardless of how scientific you want to be all that information and data is going to passed through that wonderful, complex and mysterious organ that is the human brain. When an artist creates a work they're bringing a whole panoply of conscious and subconscious influences to what they put down on paper, model in a computer etc. In the case of technical drawings for papers etc this filter is dialled right back (it has to be - no room for flights of fancy here) but for much of the rest of the time it's on and working flat out, bringing all an artist's experience and philosophy to bear on the subject at hand. Even in paintings and illustrative reconstructions the filter will be hard at work and is in a very real sense creating a mini-mythos that enables the artist to imagine the creatures he's depicting as living, breathing animals. Even if the animal is depicted accurately there is going to be one whole shedload of speculation and supposition in that depiction, any of which could be false.

It's fair to argue that so much is unknown we should be daring in our art. The work of such artists as Luis Rey and Bill Stout could be called mythological as a large amount of the reconstruction is speculative, the execution is stylised yet these images give life to the animals and communicate the work done by palaeontologists in the labs and in the field. These accurate reconstructions but also highly speculative in many ways; they are also powerful examples of good paleoart.

So perhaps it's OK, even unavoidable to create a certain mythology when depicting ancient life as living plants and animals. Perhaps my picture does convey something of the savagery of a large carnivorous dinosaur in a feeding frenzy (or perhaps it fails utterly?), gives some insight into it's inner nature - a subject that will forever be dominated by speculation. I would suggest it would even be desirable in paleoart to have some real left-field artist representations, something more abstract that might communicate the more speculative aspects of ancient life via emotion, intuition and the other influences artist have always brought with them to their work. In some respects, any and all reconstructions could be called false, but perhaps within the field we call paleoart there is place for more than purely scientific interpretation. No art exists in a vacuum, paleoart sits in an uneasy position between science and art and by definition consists of both in terms of technique and philosophy.


So should we call it paleo art, or scientific illustration?

The original ink sketch.

*I have no firm idea what this is. Sort of the quintessence, the nature, the theropodian id. It is by it's very nature undefinable, but it must have been there as it's there in every other living thing, from protists to blue whales.