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!