Catalogue

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the scientific world was on fire with new discoveries and interpretations that painted the world of dinosaurs as very different from the old image of slow, stupid, swamp-dwelling creatures. These new dinosaurs were active; some of them were even warm-blooded! Some were smart and social.

National Geographic Magazine decided to do a special story on the new dinosaurs, and commissioned me to create five paintings for the issue. They brought me on board because I had already been heavily involved in creating art related to this new wave of information about dinosaurs, including the cover of the popular book that first brought these ideas to the public (Bob Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies) and preproduction art for the first movie to do the same (Jurassic Park), as well as covers for Discover Magazine and Natural History Magazine.

Among the new findings was evidence that some dinosaurs were actively involved in parenting. This included the discovery of six-foot hadrosaur nests and even colonial nesting sites. Baby hadrosaurs were found in fossilized nests, and some of them had worn teeth. This meant that either the babies were leaving the nest to forage for food and then finding their way back to the nest or, more likely, that their parents were bringing them food.

One of my paintings was of a group of Saurolophus at a colonial nesting site, including mothers and babies (and possibly fathers!). I painted a scene at dawn, with incendiary warm light illuminating the scene. Later I got the call: the painting had beat out some spectacular photography for the cover of the January 1993 issue.

In the late 1980s, after the publication of The Dinosaur Heresies, there was a firestorm of public interest in dinosaurs, as new ideas that made them much more dramatic creatures poured in from the scientific community. They were active! Some were warm-blooded! Many were social, caring for their young or hunting in packs! I was fortunate to be involved in the presentation of these ideas to the public, doing art for magazine covers (National Geographic Magazine, Discover Magazine, Natural History Magazine), dinosaur stamps by the U.S. Postal Service, and the movie Jurassic Park.

The American Museum of Natural History decided to create a spectacular dinosaur tableau for their rotunda exhibit. This would be composed of three skeletons, with a mother Barosaurus rearing on its hind legs to protect its baby from a marauding Allosaurus. The AMNH contacted me in 1990 to create a painting of this scene, so that a reproduction could accompany the rotunda mount. I accepted the challenge.

One challenge in creating the painting was to capture the enormity of the scene. The head of the mother Barosaurus is five stories up from its feet! In dealing with this, I had to make the perspective change quite a bit from the lower part of the painting to the upper part, where everything is seen from below. The clouds had to change, the pterosaurs had to change, and the dinosaur itself had to change so that the head is looking down at us from a great height.

There is debate among scientists about whether a huge sauropod such as this could actually rear up on its hind limbs. The Smithsonian's paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues replied to questions about this: "Yes, but only once."

A reproduction of the painting now accompanies the AMNH rotunda mount. The rotunda mount, and my fleshed-out painting of the scene, has become the AMNH's symbol of the dynamic new ideas about dinosaurs.