Evolution is a simple fact of life. Every time I start drawing another animal common descent screams at me. It’s really the only thing that makes drawing and painting extinct creatures at all possible. Although we talk all the time of the incredible diversity of life on our planet, that diversity is really an amazing amount of variation on a relatively very few themes.*

We admire and envy the flight of an eagle. We are astounded by the speed and reactions of a cheetah. We see a dolphin flash through the water seemingly as fluid as the liquid surrounding it. We see perfection.

But I would argue we have no way of knowing what perfection would be. We only have what is. And what I see is a world of jerry-rigged creatures formed mindlessly by evolution on a limited number of body plans, with only the variation within each generation as raw material. As products of evolution they are astounding. Considered as the supposed result of independent creation, they are amazingly devoid of novelty, imagination or inventiveness.

Devonian Lobe-finned Fish, Eusthenopteron

1.

Before the first backboned creature ever crawled out of a Devonian swamp the basic body plan of all terrestrial vertebrates was established. Every amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal carries in their genes that morphological baggage. In mammals for instance, the same set of bones inherited from their reptilian and amphibian antecedents is responsible for (and has been warped into) the wing of a bat, the flipper of a whale, the foreleg of a horse, and my own arm. At the same time, that genetic “baggage” limits the forms vertebrates can assume and gives us the concept of convergence.

Working on any vertebrate, nothing I draw is ever completely novel. Genetic, ecological and physical restraints keep the vertebrate body coming back to a few optimally functional forms.

Thylacine and Dingo

2.
For a larger, more detailed image click on this red type

Here we have a recently extinct, marsupial Thylacine (3.) and its ecological equivalent (and replacement in Australia), the Dingo, a placental canine carnivore. These mammals have had separate evolutionary histories since at least the early Cretaceous. Both are the descendants of little insectivorous creatures that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs. So are aardvarks and elephants, but in this case both these creatures evolved to do the same ecological task. And apparently the best functional form for a cursorial mammalian predator is “doggish”. Certainly not perfect, just good enough. Given a conscious, involved designer there’s no reason for that to be so, but evolution can’t just invent new gadgetry out of nothing.

Early Flesh-eating Ungulate, Pachyaena

For a larger, more detailed image click on this red type

This is one of the smaller, more gracile species of genus Pachyaena and it was doggish in the early Eocene long before anything that could be called a canine was around. Pachyaena was a Mesonychid, a flesh eating ungulate with small, spatulate hooves, a relative of the artiodactyls, represented today by cattle and deer, camels and antelope, hippos and pigs.

All too often I hear narrators on the National Geographic, Discovery or Animal Channel refer to one creature or another as perfectly adapted to their environment. Perhaps since a species can last a long time and fit well into an ecosystem, that statement seems close to true, but individuals are evolutionary fodder. Each animal lives on the edge of the precipice, one misstep away from disease, injury and death. All that matters is that enough members of a population reach breeding age and parent the next generation.

It can be depressing if you dwell on it, and indeed, there’s always a touch of melancholy present as I marvel at the natural world. But if anything, their imperfection makes the individual creatures I portray that much more beautiful and all that more endearing to me because I know the absolute indifference they face in their world; a world without the medical and technological insulation we surround ourselves with.
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* Since my career has overwhelmingly involved the depiction of vertebrates, I use them for my examples. I certainly mean no disrespect to other phyla, and it’s no doubt true that vertebrates are simply a very thin and showy frosting on the cake of life.

1. This illustration is one of many I did in 1997-98 for Carl Zimmer’s book on two of the major transitions in the history of life, At The Water’s Edge.

2. For another look at both the similarities and differences of these two animals, read this great December post by Martin Brazeau at The Lancelet.

3. For an absolutely wonderful site full of information on Thylacines, including films of the last surviving individuals in captivity click here!

Today I’m asking all of you to visit the weblog of my new friend Carel Brest Van Kempen, Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding. I’ve known of Carel’s work for a number of years, but he showed up recently in my comments and a mutual admiration society soon developed. His work is exquisite! Even on my best days I could never handle pigment with his sensitivity. That wouldn’t be so bad, except he’s younger than me, and damn, if he isn’t an intelligent, eloquent writer also. Take your time and go back through his posts and the links to his gallery. It will be well worth it. He even has a gorgeous coffee table book for sale showcasing 140 paintings.

For a closer look at Mr. Darwin and Geospiza magnirostris, click here.

February 12th, 1809. Born the same day as Abraham Lincoln.

As I post this I know damn well I should have painted him as an old man with a white beard, but I just couldn’t do it. No, I had to try this. I managed to find only 3 photographs of Mr. Darwin as a younger man, and none near the time of the Voyage of the Beagle. Taking 20 or 30 years off a face is not terribly hard, but understanding it enough to make that face smile is another thing. And I know people really did smile in the 19th Century, but considering the dental care of the period, and the duration of the film exposures, I guess it would have been asking a lot.

Mr. Darwin probably viewed a lot more of the finches over the sights of a shotgun than this way, it was a different time, but the wonders of life around him must have caused a lot of smiles to form. All the wildlife of the Galapagos was remarkably tame and let’s face it, if I can share a beer with an Australopithecine on this blog, Charles Darwin can share a smile with one of the finches that will bear his name.

My friend GrrlScientist over at Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) does a wonderful feature each Friday called “Birds in the News”. It got me to thinking that I haven’t drawn many birds recently (they were ALL I drew as a child), so it was about time and I was trying to decide exactly what I could do when this darted by my bedroom window…

For a closer look at this little male Accipiter cooperii click here.

…and “nailed” a Mourning Dove amid an explosion of wings. A flock of about 35 to 40 doves was on the ground below my deck and apparently this Cooper’s Hawk came around the corner of the house before the doves realized he was there. I used the phrase “an explosion of wings” and I meant it. If I had been asleep the sound would have awakened me as surely as a gunshot.

I first noticed the hawk as he came through a stand of spruce on our property line and using the house as cover made the direct and controlled gliding descent shown above. Only when within 10 yards of the house did he tuck his wings tightly and without a single flap accelerate and rocket around the corner.

By the time I stumbled to the kitchen where I could see my bird-feeding area (I actually shovel a large area near brush cover clear of snow), the “Coops” was standing on his feebly struggling victim. He adjusted his grip a number of times before finally grabbing the dove’s head with his long thin toes and starting to pluck the feathers from its neck. At this point Tito*, who I let out a few minutes earlier, came back from his morning visit to our little woodlot, and the startled hawk flew off in one direction, while the dove, to my utter amazement, flew off in the other! That same mourning dove, missing feathers and looking beat to hell, was back today feeding with her flock. One tough little bird!

We tend to think of birds of prey as incredibly efficient hunters and they are, to a degree. However, most birds and mammals die from predation in nature’s equivalent of a mugging or knife fight. Very often it’s not clean or swift. The only redeeming feature is that neither predator nor prey possess any malice or choice in the event.

Had I the time, I would have tried to paint the actual attack. But since I’ve got four posts (including the infamous mammoth piece) in progress right now and it’s seemingly taking me forever to draw anything, I wanted to get this one up as soon as possible. This is what I could do.

Again, it’s a digital piece done in Photoshop with my Wacom Graphics Tablet. I try at first not to worry too much about exact proportions, but simply rough in (and I do mean rough) an approximation of the idea. Here is the first of about 20 layers.

I meant to save more, but I have to admit that I got into it late on Wednesday evening, and simply forgot to duplicate and save what I should have. I do have these two close-ups of the head.

The top is the refined sketch with 3 layers beneath it showing through, and below it is the completed face. This is an adult male at least three years old. Immature birds have yellow eyes and it takes three seasons before the iris deepens to red. When I saw the hawk standing over the dove I realized it was a male because of its small size. In hawks and owls, the female birds are larger than males. In the three North American Accipiter* species, this is markedly so.

I’ve got all three species on my “yard list” by the way (71 species at this point that have been seen in or from my yard), Sharp-shinned, Cooper’s and Goshawk in order of increasing size. Sharpies and Coopers are not uncommon, and last year I had a first year immature Goshawk take a gray squirrel right at the lawn edge. About twice a week I’ll find a small scattering of feathers or a little blood on the snow. It seems I’m feeding the birds on a two-tiered system.

*Tito…The dog that won’t die…16…and after yet another close call doing very well thank you.

*Accipiters are “bird hawks” with short rounded wings and long tails for acceleration, agility and control in tight situations. Other birds make up much of their diet. Apparently they are immigrants from Eurasia. I can find no fossil NA record before the Pleistocene. Hawks and eagles in general go back to the early Eocene (45+ million years ago) in Europe (England), but are absent as fossils before the Oligocene (33 million years ago) here in the Americas.

Life took yet another little detour this weekend as Tito once again worked through a crisis. His gums and tongue were pale, he refused food and water, and he was listless and could hardly stand. The vet said he was bleeding internally somewhere, but since he didn’t show distress at all, just weakness, I thought I’d give him just one more day for all the great doggy dreams he seemed to be having. And damn if he didn’t start drinking Sunday night. Monday he took solid food, and today we walked a good half-mile together in a local park. He was slow of course, but really enjoyed himself, rolling in and eating the snow, peeing on every bush in sight, and even trying to solicit play from another dog a mere 12 years old. As hard as he is on my sleep and work, he’s inspiring.

Last week, see here and here and here, there was a paper published about a new and bizarre species of early crocodile relative (poposaur) that was found in a plaster-jacketed slab of fossilized bone from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch quarry. It had been at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for decades. Named Effigia, this little (6-foot) late Triassic animal was toothless and a biped!

Since I was up much of the night anyway Friday and Saturday, I thought that even though Effigia lived well outside the time-frame that Olduvai was dedicated to, I’d try a little reconstruction based on the bone and skull drawings available on-line. Here’s the result.

For a closer look click here

That reminded me of an early Cretaceous vegetarian crocodile from Mongolia’s Gobi desert that I painted for Discover magazine back in 1997. Here’s that little acrylic piece.

For a closer look click here

The animal is called Chimerosuchus, and was small (3-foot), terrestrial, and long-legged. It also sported four spatulate “buck” teeth. I was lucky with this painting in that I had one of the world’s experts on fossil crocodiles as my guide. In fact it was Han-Dieter Sues who had solved the question of exactly what group the little creature belonged to. As with Effigia, it was the unique structure of the ankle that was the first clue.

Today, crocodilians fill only a small amount of the ecological space that they occupied at various times in the past. All are ambush predators, scavengers, or fish eaters today. Two of the most unusual are the gavial or gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) and the false gavial (Tomistoma schlegelii). As the common names indicate, the long and narrow jaws of these two crocodiles were thought to be the result of convergent evolution. Genetic and new morphological studies however show them to have a common narrow-snouted ancestor.

For a closer look click here

This digital illustration was the cover of the June 2003 issue of the journal Systematic Biology. A detail of the gavial’s head shows that it was one of my earlier attempts with Photoshop.

For a closer look click here

The original was done at 600 dpi and was an enormous file. It needed to be as I actually counted thousands of scales from about 30 different photos and scientific drawings to make sure my animals were accurate. I also had to change my layout rather late in the process, because the initial measurements I had for the cover were wrong (my fault). Tomistoma was rising to take a small animal from the surface of the water and I had to leave the victim off.

For a brief but well-written look at Croc evolution and that unique ankle joint, take this link to Tim McDonald’s (afarensis) ” Transitions” site.

The Florida Museum of Natural History has a wonderful site on all the living Crocodilian species. I’ve linked the pages of the two featured in my painting, but here is a link to the introduction page. Lots of information.