This post was supposed to be about protowhales. This is my blog however, and I’m postponing the post! Why? Because today is November 29th, 2006. 60!!! Yes, 60 years ago today, early on Friday evening, November 29th, 1946, I wriggled and screamed my way into the world. It’s been all downhill. Born to Harold Ronald Buell and Eleanor Virginia Brust, it was as if they were breeding for an athlete. That it didn’t exactly work out wasn’t their genes’ fault. My father was a local baseball legend and a starting guard of the Nott Terrace High School (Schenectady), New York State men’s championship basketball team, 1934. My mother, also an athlete, was the star forward of the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake High School women’s New York State champs, 1936 or 37, and one of the best woman bowlers in the state in the 1950s. They met when he saw her play in a women’s city league game after she graduated.

Legend is not too strong a word. Dad started playing for money with a traveling team at 16 during The Depression. It’s hard to imagine today how popular baseball was in the 1930s. When dad played for GE, 10,000 people would show up for a Saturday game. He always led off and led the team in batting. In 1939 he won the title by a mere 110 points hitting 519! I couldn’t do that in Little League. Yes, the GE team really was called “the Refrigerators”!

My father used to love to tell the story of their first date. Always the romantic, after a casual diner dinner he took mom to the local bowling alley where my mother proceeded to beat him by 100 pins in a three game match to the accompanying hoots and laughter of his friends. I call it a match, because while it started out as fun, it soon became apparent that “popular baseball star” was being trounced by “girl”. Dad got serious, but it only got worse. He always jokingly insisted that he didn’t really want to continue the relationship (a lie, mom was a hottie - see below); he simply kept coming back asking for dates trying to beat her. He never did, and fell in love instead. It was much easier.

World War II ended dad’s baseball dreams. He was called up by both the Cleveland Indians and the US Army in the summer of 1941. The Army won the contract and dad was on a ship on his way to the Philippines when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He didn’t see my mother for over 3 years. My mother passed the time by marrying some guy named White and then having the marriage annulled after a very short time. This part of the story didn’t come out until I was 17. It’s still unclear to me exactly what happened exactly when, but she was waiting for dad when he came home, so whatever occurred, they worked it out long distance. After the war, dad was invited to tryouts by Brooklyn and St.Louis, but experiences in the Pacific had left him shaken and at the time, my mother seemed more comforting then baseball.

My father Harold, mother Ellie, and My dad’s brother Don, also a terrific ballplayer and later New York State amateur golf champion. As the first Buell of my post-war generation, the expectations were enormous.

Banking on his local popularity, dad got a job as a sportswriter and turned his love for sports into a 45-year career. Later he would win an Associated Press award as outstanding minor-league baseball writer (for an early 50s series called “View From the Dugout”), but at that moment he was happy just to be home, employed, and engaged. My parents were married, March 1946, and 8 months later, I was born.

I was a honeymoon baby!

Mom and I. This is the earliest picture I could find of myself. I know there are maternity ward pictures somewhere, but I had all the wrinkles then that I’m getting back now.

Yeah, sure. The family mythology says that while 8 months pregnant, my mother, ever the athlete, tried to move the springs of a 1945 Desoto that were in her way on the porch and immediately went into labor. I don’t think that explanation holds water however, because after mom’s broke, I was born 7 lbs. 9 oz., a perfectly respectable birth weight.

Mom and I during our “Grapes of Wrath” phase.

There was hardly any room in the cradle what with the bat, ball and glove, but I managed. It seemed like a good start to a life, and it was, at least for a while. Things would change, but that’s a story for another time. Today I’ve been alive for a full 60 years and I want to enjoy the moment, giving it all the how-the-hell-is-this-possible fear it deserves. Friday I’ll have another whale post up.

Until then I’ll leave you with a photo of a type of unfortunate behavior that would make my life all too complicated in the coming years. It was taken in Schenectady, New York, the summer of 1948.

For a closer look at Orcinus orca click here.

or this…

For a closer look at Balaenoptera acutorostrata, the Minke Whale, click here.

From this?

For a closer look at Pakicetus click here.

It took a long time and it’s going to take a number of posts.

We’re back in time a little over 50 million years. The dinosaurs have been gone for only 13 or 14 million years. Gone too are the great marine lizards. Along the shoreline of the shallow Tethys Sea, on the south coast of the landmass of Eurasia, mammals are turning their interest to an abundant realm long denied them. In nature, no available resource is ever ignored for long, and a coyote-sized animal named Pakicetus is taking the first tentative steps into the warm waters of streams and deltas in its (uppermost middle) Eocene world.

It had a long, narrow snout and brain case, close-set eyes, a robust sagittal crest, and the heavy tail of earlier archaic mammals. It also had fairly long (for the time) legs ending in small hooves. What makes Pakicetus interesting to us here however, can’t be seen in my painting. The skull has an ear region that is highly unusual in shape, and resembles the same area only in the skulls of modern and fossil whales. This feature is diagnostic for cetaceans, is found in all cetaceans, and in no other animal. Pakicetus certainly could swim, but not strongly, and perhaps foraged as a wader, or moved along the streambed like a modern hippo, feeding on crustaceans and other aquatic animals using its long vibrissae- covered snout to feel its way through the shallows.

Even earlier, lost for now in the mist-shrouded era of the Paleocene, an archaic ungulate ancestor gave rise to animals that would eventually lead to artiodactyls (even-toed hoofed animals with incredible modern diversity including; camels, deer, cattle, goats, sheep, antelope, pigs and hippos), mesonychids (carnivorous, or at least omnivorous, hoofed mammals, all now extinct), and cetaceans. The timing of exactly what diverged when is still being researched and debated. I’ll have a number of diagrams, cladograms and trees up in the near future.

As an artist and not a scientist, I’m going to leave questions of timing up to the molecular biologists and paleontologists involved, and simply supply the illustrations. I’ve been fortunate to participate in a peripheral way in a number of projects by portraying many of the creatures in the evolutionary transition back to aquatic life. You’ll be seeing most of them here in the next few months. I might even have a guest post or two from the scientists I’ve worked with.

A note on the restoration of Pakicetus

Unless you find that once-in-a-lifetime, fully articulated skeleton with skin, scale, fur or feather impressions, the further back you go in time, the more difficult the process becomes of bringing an extinct animal to life. Hopefully, any guesswork involved is educated guesswork based on comparative anatomy, but Pakicetus, as portrayed here, is based on a skull and non-articulated post-cranial material. That means it’s a composite. The bones are from a number of individuals. As more fossils are found and described, Pakicetus’ look will change. My take on any fossil-based animal is just that, my take. You can only be true to the fossil evidence you have presented to you and then try to make informed decisions about surface features and color based on possible relatives (or ecological equivalents) of your subject that are alive today and the type of environment the animal lived in.

The one thing I always do, is try to look at each animal as a completely formed individual. What I mean by that in this case, is that I didn’t think of Pakicetus as a “future whale” or an early step toward whaleness - even though it certainly was from our viewpoint. Any naturalist transported into the past would see Pakicetus as a successful creature in the world of its time. Changing conditions, differential survival, and genetic mutation would do their work, but Pakicetus lived and breathed and foraged and mated and died a complete creature.

For a closer look at Lagenorhynchus acutus, the Atlantic White-sided Dolphin, click here.

This little white-sided Dolphin - a fast, acrobatic, and conspicuous resident of the North Atlantic - is not an “end” result, but simply a glorious, present-day manifestation of Darwin’s final words in The Origin of Species: “…endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

I know, I know, I said Tuesday and Friday and here it is Thusday. I’m still getting used to WordPress, and my work is nothing if not labor intensive. I spent all day yesterday painting hair on a bison. Bison latifrons is the big, long-horned, high-backed species of the North American Pleistocene. It’s a lot of hair, and it doesn’t simply point from the front to the back, so you have to be aware at all times of direction and “flow” and texture. It’ll be posted here in the not-so-distant future, as soon as it’s up in the museum display at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.

For right now, I’m putting up the last animal “portrait” I did for a private client. I painted this Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) for a friend some 8 years ago. The original is acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 inches.

Click here for a much more detailed image.

There’s the idealized animal that we see in our mind and memory, and then there’s the real critter. Whenever I first sketch a cat of any genus other than Panthera, I tend to make the head too big in proportion to the body; cheetahs especially so. First drafts also see my Hippo and Weasel legs too long, and my eagle feet too big (except for Harpies and couple others). The trick is to realize it and make the adjustments.

As I was painting this piece I remember wishing I could paint Wyoming as the background. Up until a few thousand years ago, we had cheetah or very cheetah-like cats here in North America. They still reside here in the evolutionary memory of the Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), and in my dreams.

Back in the rich (for me) old days when I did quite a bit of work in advertising, I often had to draw things I knew very little about. Even then, the vast majority of subjects I dealt with were things biological, but I still had to admit ignorance about far too much of it. One of those subjects was fish. I’ve seldom fished, was never particularly interested in fish, and still look at them far too often as simply packets of protein-rich food for the mammals, birds and reptiles I draw. They are of course, in spite of how much I love sashimi, not simply food, but beautiful, vibriant creatures, some with absolutely amazing life histories. My educational inadequacies notwithstanding, I paint them, if I do say so myself, rather well. And I’ve painted a lot of them. Here are just a few.

Click here to see this image (almost) the size I painted it. 

The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is an acrylic painting I did 10 or more years ago for … (?) I honestly can’t remember! (If you’re out there please email me) I’ve probably drawn and painted a couple hundred trout and salmon over the years, and I can’t tell you what happened to most of the images. This one was done while I was living in Mammoth Lakes, in the Sierra Nevada of California. All I remember is that I was given the flies and streamers that surround the fish by an avid fisherman, and put color into the animal that the stocked rainbows of the “Lakes Basin” above town just didn’t have. It would have made more sense had I made the background a sage-covered hillside behind the willow and alder along Hot Creek, a great nearby fly-fishing stream.

These little mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) were done through Split Rock Studios for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was my second attempt at doing fish digitally in PhotoShop and I’m still very pleased with the result. The fish here are much larger than life size. I remember counting the scales on a number of fuzzy photographs. Not fun; nor was trying to wrap them accurately around the larger female.

The yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and the Indo-Pacific blue marlin (Makaira mazara) are both acrylic paintings that were done for a project that never came to fruition. Again, I can’t remember exactly why I painted them, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of you have seen the yellowfin before as one of the many recycling background elements on PZ Myers’ Pharyngula.

That’s enough for now. I’m still getting used to the new WordPress setup, and with Brent Rasmussen laughing in the background as I stumble through the netherworld of computer software changes, I’m going for consistency. Once I’m up to speed with the new procedures I plan on posting each Tuesday and Friday. I need to push myself while establishing reasonable deadlines. I wish I could paint faster.

I never intended to stay away so long, but as with the rest of my unplanned life, intention by itself never proved enough; very long, incredibly convoluted story, extremely condensed version.

It took months to get this image up, please click here for a better view!

People think that my specialty is illustrating animals past and present. If I’m honest with myself, in truth that specialty has always been playing with metaphorical and emotional guns and shooting my career in the foot every couple years. In 1999 I was living in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was my 7^th state and at least my 30^th place of residence since I left upstate New York back in 1972. I was living on my own after being a lousy husband to a good woman and wonderful (amazingly still a) friend who really deserved better, when my father called and asked if there was any possibility of my coming “home”. As was always the case, I really didn’t think about what I might be getting into, I just let it happen. An old New York friend gave me the opportunity (and an entire building) to set up a studio where I could work and live and yet be close enough to enable my folks to stay in the only home they’d known for 60 years (my mother, in 82 years, had NEVER lived anywhere but her beloved hillside).

Things worked out fairly well until shortly after 9/11. My father had the first of three strokes and my mother started forgetting things. You know where this is going. As the sibling without a mate who could work at home, I inherited my parents. By the end of 2001, my life and my limping career were in storage and I was back where I swore I’d never be…home…literally. These past five years I’ve been a full-time caregiver and live-in nurse. My father passed away last summer two weeks short of ninety, and my mother, now 88, has descended into the depths of dementia and at last has an excuse for not recognizing who I am. When I started Olduvai on my 59^th birthday last November, I had my old dog Tito to get me out. He was my sanity, but as many of you reading this probably know, he died in early March.

So here I am in my 60^th year. Even though I once had a friend tell me that when he died he wanted MY life to flash in front of him, I wished I had planned things just a bit. Take away the two computers, the Concept II Rowing Machine (on which I spend an hour a day working out my frustrations) and the (truckload of) books, and I have the net worth of a second-rate, third world subsistence farmer AFTER chasing the elephants out of the crops.

If I believed in karma I would suppose that this phase of my life is penitence for the 35 rather self-serving years that preceded it, but it’s been worth it if only because I found out I have infinitely more patience than I ever believed possible. I’m also working on the premise that 60 is the new 40 (well, 45) and if I’m lucky, keep eating well, and stay in shape, I still might have 20 years of decent art in me. Who knows, I’m even learning to control my pathologically obstinate aversion to being told how things have to be done.

O.k., enough purging; Olduvai after all is my attempt to get away from responsibilities and lack of (fill in your own blank) for a few moments each day. Besides, writing this post has taken much too long. For three months* (I’m actually getting better, my first post last November took a year) I debated about how much I should delve into my present situation, and what you’ve just read in part is me finally saying to myself, “Oh shut the expletive up and post a picture!”

Although I’m not quite the attention whore I was years ago, I’m beginning this incarnation of Olduvai as I started it last November, with a self-portrait. Yes, I really am an exact stand-in for the 6-foot human silhouette that always seems to be used to show scale when depicting extinct creatures. I also have the redeeming social quality of being exactly as dumb as I look. No beer this time. Let me introduce my friends. Behind me is the Jefferson’s ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii. (Many thanks to Dr. Greg McDonald for providing me with wonderful skull and skeletal reference) To my right (your left) is the short-faced (and very leggy) bear Arctodus simus and the toothy “little” fellow in front is the “giant” (not exactly a) beaver Castoroides ohioensis. I promise I’ll get into each of these late Pleistocene residents of North America in depth in the future, but right now it’s more important to me to put this post up and be back in the blogging community. I’ve missed you guys and I want to thank everyone who took the time to email me over the past spring and summer to ask how I was doing. I was amazed and deeply touched.

*The worst part about taking so long to write this post is that since the accompanying illustration is digital, I kept looking at and changing it. I sent a jpeg of it out to half a dozen people before this posting and each time it was slightly different. Each of the creatures has been changed numerous times. When I started the drawing and it had no deadline, I worked in a very strange way for a guy trying to present anatomical accuracy. I pulled images out of my head (some might say I pull them from elsewhere) and worked with them without reference until I thought I was getting close. Only then did I refer to bone drawings, skeletal and skull photos, and measurements. I’ve been doing this for so long that I was well within the “ballpark”, but the animals I remembered and imagined were not exactly what the bones indicated and the resulting alterations were more like sculpting than painting. PhotoShop and Wacom tablets are such wonderful tools, but they enable my crash and burn and rise again methodology.

I am SO glad this is finally posted. I need deadlines! One would think since I’m so far past the midway point of my “career”, that I’d have learned better discipline…but NO! I have a third-grader’s dream job and still too often approach it like I’m in third grade.

I can’t come back with just one image. Here are two totally different little scenics that were done for publication earlier this year. I was rather pleased with both, but unfortunately, the paper they were printed on and the printing process used didn’t help the reproduction and I’m putting them up here so that people can see them as I meant them to be seen. I say that knowing full well that each of your computer screens may just display them a bit differently, but they look fine on mine!

Morning off an Alaskan island

Utah slickrock