Dinosaur art evolves with new discoveries in paleontology

Artists gain fresh eyes on the past by studying newly unearthed fossils and by adopting new methods to revisit the fossils resting in museum drawers. Consider the famous dinosaur Archaeopteryx, a distant cousin of modern birds. Paleontologists found the first two putative Archaeopteryx fossils in Germany’s Solnhofen limestone quarry around 1861. One was a single fossilized feather, and the other a skeleton with clearly preserved impressions of feathers surrounding it. Researchers wouldn’t know the color of that plumage until 2012, when they analyzed the isolated fossilized wing feather, stored at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany, using a scanning electron microscope. They found the tiny, rod-shaped impressions and three-dimensional structures of melanosomes, organelles containing the pigment melanin within the feather’s fibers. Based on the rod-shape and other characteristics of the melanosomes compared with those of modern birds, the authors concluded that the feather would have been black (3).

Another feathered dinosaur, unveiled in a study published in 2018, was iridescent (4), with arrays of flat and wide melanosomes stacked on top of each other in the feathers around its head and neck. Today’s hummingbirds have the most similarly shaped arrays in their iridescent feathers, says study coauthor Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hence, artist renderings of the species, called Caihong juji, appropriately depict a shimmering head and neck. Artists wouldn’t have the freedom to skip the iridescence on this animal. However, whether those feathers had a reddish, bluish, or greenish sheen is still up for artistic interpretation. The hue comes from the spacing of melanosome arrays in the feather, which was not preserved. “What tonalities that shiny color would have,” Clarke says, “is artistic license.”

As paleontologists unearth new evidence, artists adapt. Artists’ willingness to change with the field reflects a marriage of art and science over the last two centuries.

In her 2017 book Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past, New York-based journalist Zoë Lescaze tells the story of the first work of paleoart—a watercolor painting of a prehistoric scene of England’s southern coast populated by species known from local fossils, including marine and flying reptiles, and painted by English clergyman and geologist Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche, circa 1830 (5). “What’s charming about that image,” Lescaze says, “is he wasn’t setting out to launch a genre. He was more or less trying to help a friend.” De la Beche was raising money for Mary Anning, a prolific self-taught paleontologist, who discovered the first plesiosaur among other species, but received little credit for her discoveries because of her gender and class, according to Lescaze. To raise funds, De la Beche imagined his watercolor scene of the English coast full of species Anning had discovered. That painting “proved hugely influential,” Lescaze says, “and sparked an interest among researchers in having their discoveries reanimated in this way.”

The movement spread through Europe and across the Atlantic to the United States, infiltrating museums by the late 1800s. De la Beche and other early paleoartists strove for scientific accuracy. But there was just less evidence back then. New data about color and form gleaned from soft tissues, as well as details about animal movement based on bone stress tests, are “leaving less room for the artist’s imagination,” Lescaze says. Her book closes in the 1990s, when the field’s aesthetic shifted away from fine art influences like impressionism, toward more realistic, almost photograph-like scientific illustrations.

New data may limit artistic freedom, but they also open new possibilities. Take T. rex, for example: Two lines of potentially conflicting evidence hint at its appearance.

Fossils discovered in the last 20 years show that early relatives of T. rex had feathers “nose to tail,” says paleontologist David Hone at Queen Mary University of London, England (6). Artists responded by illustrating Tyrannosaurus with a feathery coat. But then, three years ago, paleontologists found several small scraps of skin from across T. rex’s body, with apparent scales instead of feathers (7).

Some artists had “an emotional response as well as a rational one,” says Witton. For years, paleoartists had depicted T. rex with feathers, and Witton suspects that some people preferred that established style. Because the 2017 study only found a few small scaly skin patches, it didn’t conclusively prove whether T. rex was entirely scaly or had some feathers, so artists still have some room for personal preference and interpretation.

Paleoartist Julius Csotonyi, based in British Columbia, Canada, faced the dilemma to depict T. rex with or without feathers recently, when the US Postal Service approached him to illustrate the “Nation’s T. rex,” housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, in a set of forever stamps released in August 2019. Csotonyi consulted with paleontologists and decided to take a middle path, illustrating a downy hatchling Tyrannosaurus, a juvenile with some feathers on its back, and an adult with scales and without feathers. He believes that there's insufficient data to determine whether T. rex had feathers or not, and he disagrees with some in the paleoart community who have taken a strong stance either way.

New evidence challenges artists to relearn the anatomy of animals they’re already accustomed to reconstructing in a certain way, Witton says. Suddenly knowing the placement of feathers or color can be jarring.

But Witton doesn’t believe that the new discoveries constrain paleoart. He says they feel more like new additions to his collection of knowledge, keeping him on his toes as he tries to stay current. At the core of paleoart “is a desire to recreate some sort of ancient truth,” Witton says. “So it’s a nice feeling when new data come along and you learn a little more, even about something familiar to you.”

Updating illustrations of a familiar species can feel like seeing an old friend who’s suddenly wearing glasses, he adds. It can be disconcerting. And yet, knowing what dinosaurs really looked like “is the end goal” Witton emphasizes. “This is what we should be moving toward.”