I’ve never painted anything that approached iconic, but this acrylic image of the early transistional whale Ambulocetus natans is certainly the closest I’ve come. I’m betting that most of the readers of this blog have seen it somewhere before. Based on a little pen and ink drawing I had done for my friend Carl Zimmer’s great book, At the Water’s Edge, it has now appeared in a score of books and has illustrated at least a dozen magazine articles.

Click here to see a much larger version.

I remember visiting Hans Thewissen in his lab at NEOUCOM in Rootsville, Ohio. It was after I had sent him the painting, and the second I saw the real material I said “damn, I made the femur too long!”

In doing the drawings for Zimmer’s book, I had consulted with Dr. Hans Thewissen, who had found the fossils of Ambulocetus in Eocene (approximately 49 million year old) rock in Pakistan. Hans and I became friends, and in appreciation for his help, I painted the image for his lab at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) where he teaches Gross Human Anatomy to future doctors to facilitate his passion for protowhales and other early Cenozoic mammals.

When dealing artistically with an animal like Ambulocetus, for which there are no modern analogs except seemingly bizarre combinations like crocodile/seal, I remind myself (just as with Pakicetus) not to think about it as halfway to something else. Ambulocetus was a large (11 to 12 feet long), powerful and successful animal of its time. Looking at creatures that live in similar habitats today, comparing features, and staying true to the bones (at least the measurements and photos I was given - new discoveries change things all the time) I try to keep my imagination and my ego in check. When I’m working with a scientist who has spent years studying some particular creature, what I want to produce is the animal that they see when they close their eyes and think of their subject as an animated living being.

Here’s an early version of Ambulo I call my fur seal phase. Too much hair and bulk for me today, but the drawing shows the splay-legged stance and outward rotated hand. Its name may mean “walking/swimming whale” but it must have been very clumsy on land and incapable of anything we’d think of as a normal mammalian walking stride.

I’ve drawn or painted Ambulocetus a dozen times - pelted, haired and naked - and I’ve never gotten it right. I’ll never know its color pattern, the length or density of its hair or the exact amount of muscle or fat on its frame. Those qualities are beyond the scope of what we can ever absolutely know, and exterior features can evolve very quickly. What I can do is be as conscientious as possible in proposing a look by considering as many factors as possible and providing reasonable external characteristics for the proposed lifestyle.

Fossils of Ambulocetus are found only in deposits that indicate the environment was near-shore marine and swampy or brackish. At the time, the site of discovery in what are now mountains in Pakistan, was a warm, shallow sea and tidal river delta. I gave Ambulocetus very little in the way of fat or blubber, as it simply wouldn’t have been needed for insulation and its ancestors had evolved in the even warmer world of the earliest Eocene. Originally, I portrayed it attacking and removing a primitive perissodactyl (horse, rhino, tapir or brontothere - you choose) from the gene pool, but in this latest version I have it hunting crabs in a tidal shallows. Perhaps not so animated, but still predatory, and I think, quite a beautiful beast.

Click here to view a much larger image

Or click here to see Ambulocetus without the distortion imposed by integrating the animal into a full painting

I’ve painted its face as hairless except for the robust vibrissae, for grubbing along the Tethys’ shoreline hunting for mollusks, and I’ve also scarred his snout, neck and shoulders from imagined battles with competing males. That formidable head and those impressive teeth seem to me not just for crushing mollusks and crustaceans or for capturing fish, but for gaping, ritualistic displays to intimidate rivals, and if push comes to shove, actual combat. O.K., I said just a couple paragraphs ago I keep my imagination out of it, but after the construction is done, you have to come up with ways to make the animal alive, and that involves behavior. Besides, considering the displays of hippos and other related artiodactyls today, it’s not such a stretch. I’ve also taken some license with the coloring here. If I were doing this for a museum display, I’d probably make the animal darker and mottled or even faintly striped above and light below to better blend the hunter into its background. Here the object is to show the proportions and anatomy, and I didn’t want a camouflage pattern to interfere with actual contour.

I’ve talked a little of the difficulties of recreating long extinct animals and touched very briefly, in my Pakicetus post, on the complications of understanding what lineage diverged when, and from exactly what, in the evolutionary process. While I look at each creature I draw as an individual and complete entity, our knowledge of them and the science behind it is an evolutionary process itself. As with so many other things, our journey of discovery about whales and their ancestors is really just beginning. Yes, we know quite a bit, but in our written history of over 5,000 years, we’ve only been developing the methodolgy for looking at the world around us rationally for the past few centuries. Dr. Phil Gingerich found that first Pakicetus skull less than 30 years ago, and Dr. Thewissen found Ambulocetus in the early 1990s. Rodhocetus, Kutchicetus and others, coming soon to a blog near you, have all been unearthed within the last 10 years, and DNA and other biochemical work is in its precocious, brilliant infancy; stay tuned!