March of the Hippo/Artio? Whales
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
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!
December 1st, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Nice. Very nice. Looking forward to your posts about other whales!
December 2nd, 2006 at 12:10 am
Beautiful job, again!
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:43 am
Science News Update (02 Dec 2006)…
Below are some more interesting news items in the world of science.
Cetacean evolution, continued
I wrote last week about the evolution of cetaceans (dolphins and whales); the entry was inspired by a post at Olduvai George with beautiful illustrations …
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:00 am
Another trackback:
http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=80891#80891
I said you are a great antidote to the “transitional forms” boogie man.
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:39 am
I’ve often thought that it’s such a shame that only the fossilized bones remain, and not a hint of color or texture of fur or skin. You do such a great job of imagining how they might have looked. It makes me wonder if you ever dream of them?
December 2nd, 2006 at 10:51 am
Absolutely amazing!!! That Ambulocetus is extremely realistic, you give it a cool expresion of living, real animal. Congratulations for such excellent work. BTW, I’ve saw the first Ambulocetus pic long time ago, I didn’t knew you were the author.
December 2nd, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Abdul, and everyone: A friend once found art I had done for an article on whale evolution in Discover Magazine on a creationist site. It was being used without permission and while saying the illustration was well done, they were laughing at and mocking it, calling it silly lies, and saying the only reason people thought of Ambulocetus as a transitional species was that I painted it that way. If I only had that power! The site and page disappeared a short time later, at least I couldn’t find it any more, but I learned years ago, dealing with my own family, that nothing I could say would make any difference to them if they were of that mindset. I’m not going to argue evolution/creation here; there are too many places to do that on the web as it is. I’m going to let the younger, smarter, credentialed people do that and help with a painting or drawing when I can. Evolution is a simple fact of life to me. I’m 60 years old and just want to spend the time I have left painting.
As far as transitional species go, we actually have what could easily be called transitional animals with us right now. Seals and sea lions are caught between two worlds and yet we think of them as fully formed. For all we know chipmunks may only be halfway to something resembling naked mole rats. If you went back to the early Eocene as a zoologist, you would find for example, a number of very similar, closely related small mammals with little hooves on their toes and have absolutely no idea which of those creatures would lead to what today we call a horse, or a tapir, or a rhino, or a brontothere. Nothing was set in stone then except as fossils. Nothing is set in stone now.
December 2nd, 2006 at 5:44 pm
I wonder if the first painting was the inspiration for that scene in the first Walking With [Prehistoric] Beasts episode a few years back. It showed exactly that - ambulocetus attacking a primitive horse. (In the scene, however, it missed: the horse was instead later gotten by the terror-bird, gastornis.)
December 3rd, 2006 at 1:11 pm
You remind us of why this is all so much fun! Really, it’s acience fiction uncircumscribed by the limits of human imagination — but filled in and fleshed out by that same faculty. You use color and line the way a poet uses letter and sound, and stretch and bend it all to the outline of what’s known so far the way a poet uses rhyme and/or meter, instress and music, to make it all dance and fly.
I hope you save your “outtakes.”
December 4th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Terrific as always! Thanks!
December 4th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Love it. I really dig the transition to whales.
But as an animator I’m longing to see the clouds of silt churned up in the water by that attack. Whatsamatter, Carl, you didn’t want to hide the animal in a bunch of murky water?
December 5th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Blogrolling: O…
Let me know what’s missing - in the past installments I missed some of the obvious biggies (and you did not tell me!) like MyDD, Juan Cole, Crooks & Liars…!!!!……
December 5th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Carl, I really enjoy your blog. Your work brings the science to life for me.
I don’t know if you listen to requests, but I was hoping you would might entertain this one. Could we have Kutchicetus next? Pretty please?
December 5th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Carl: wonderful pictures. They look more like illustrations from life than reconstructions. If you were to show a portfolio of your work to someone unfamiliar with many of the extant animals as well as the extinct, I suspect they’d have problems deciding which were the living animals and which the long passed.
Oh, and, here’s the gift of a defence for the long femur in the first of those Ambulocetus paintings from a bureaucrat and thus naturally given to spin: it was an early Ambulocetus!
December 6th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Wow!!Totally impressed!!
December 8th, 2006 at 10:51 am
I’ve seen the top one…
They used it in “After the Dinosaurs,” didn’t they?
December 9th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Well, the BBC’s walking with prehistoric beasts production inexplicably had an ambulocetus terrorizing the denizens of Germany’s Messel formation. Maybe if they actually had lived there, they would have been preserved with hair intact like Messel animals often do?
As with ludodactylus, we can always hope life imitates art.
How did this animal propell itself? It looks mostly like a paddler.
December 9th, 2006 at 10:11 am
R.Arthur: I’m not exactly sure what the BBC people were looking at when they “created” their Ambulocetus. That broadheaded animal was certainly not what I or Hans was seeing. As for the way it swam, think otter, paddling yes, but combined with dorso-ventral flexing of the powerful back and tail to give those webbed back feet added push.