Tito’s Friend

As I mentioned yesterday, my old dog Tito has been having night terrors. The medication he’s on takes time to build up in his system, but last night was another tough one. It’s hard watching your old friend in difficulty when nothing you do seems to help. The vet warned me about this because the tranquilizers I had been giving him can’t be administered as the new medication takes hold. During the day he still enjoys the snorts and walks, and his eyes are still bright and clear, so I’m not ready to love him enough to let him go. It hasn’t come to that yet.

Back when I first started thinking about Olduvai in book form I painted this piece in acrylic on illustration board. Tito is only 9 here and still in possession of the beautiful demarcation across his chest that he lost (along with life number 5) on a horseshoe stake buried in snow. The picture is a little grainy and not as clean as the art in my earlier posts, but I had only an old low resolution scan to work with. For comparison, Tito is 26 inches at the shoulder.

For a slightly larger if somewhat fuzzy image click here

Tito’s friend here is the North American species of scimitar cat, Homotherium serum. Most people are familiar with the classic saber-tooth, Smilodon, the “tiger” of La Brea Tar Pits fame, but relatively few know of this unusual cat. As you can see, Homotherium (literally “man’s beast” because the first fossils of the European species were found in association with human remains and artifacts – it’s not clear who was eating who) had a markedly different body type from most felids. The head was held high on the long, strong neck. The forelegs were elongated, while the hind quarters were rather squat with feet perhaps partially plantigrade.

While the 9 inch (+) daggers of Smilodon were somewhat laterally flattened, the 5 inch canines of Homotherium were razor-sharp blades, serrated both front and back. These were not teeth for holding on to struggling prey animals. Suffocating or throttling or crushing a victim was not the scimitar cat’s MO. This was a very fast felid of open country with acceleration and agility. The most likely form of attack would have been a lightning fast slash producing a profusely bleeding wound. It would have been awfully tough to watch on Animal Planet, but allowed Homotherium to strike prey as large as not-so-young mammoths. In a cave in Texas, the bones of both adult scimitar cats and cubs have been found in association with a large number of (mostly juvenile) mammoth and mastodon teeth.

I apologize for jumping around so. Some day I’ll have enough images to put them in some sort of order as to time and location and make better connections. But then again, I guess a blog is supposed to be forever a work in progress.

Well, it’s the 22nd, and the proboscideans post I promised isn’t ready. Unfortunately, one does have to eat and in my case right now, pay vet bills. About a month ago my old dog Tito (he’s 16) started having what can only be described as night terrors. Something was going on (or perhaps off is a better word) in his head, and he would pace all night long. I haven’t slept a full night, or even a couple hours straight, since it started. Each time I’d think he was finally settling down and I would get comfortable back in bed, I’d hear him up again, panting, his tags jingling softly.

Some pretty good human brains from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Schools have been working on the problem however, and things are getting better (Tito is actually sleeping peacefully as I write this – probably not for long), but I’m still behind in my work. Lack of sleep isn’t one of the better stimuli for creativity.

Another thing is my own perfectionism. Whenever I draw extinct creatures I want the viewer to feel the life that once animated them as forcefully as I do. All my life there’s been this constant battle between what I can see with my mind’s eye and what my hands can accomplish. In the next day or two, while I still won’t have the whole piece ready, I plan to post the entire process of creating one of the proboscidean drawings from scratch showing all the steps along the way.

In the meantime I’ll post this little scenic.

For over twenty years I’ve done three little images each issue for In Brief, the quarterly review journal of Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund. The cover story this issue was about the hard lessons learned from the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina. Whenever I’m given flat land to portray the sky becomes an integral and equally important part of the painting. Using the shafts of light through the layered clouds I was trying to bring both the reality of a clearing storm and the metaphorical promise of renewal into the image. After dealing with the details of anatomy, cloudscapes like this are just relaxing fun.

For a larger more detailed image click here

I know this is before the time frame of my site, but a while back I did this Tylosaurus* for Oregon Public Broadcasting. After they had used it on a program about evolution, I sent it to Mike Everhart. Mike is Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, Kansas, and the creator of the “Oceans of Kansas” website. If you’ve never stopped by this incredible site, please do so. For a great part of prehistory, what is now Kansas lay beneath a shallow sea. Mike is an expert on marine reptiles, and has gifted the curious with the best resource imaginable about these remarkable animals and their place and time in the deep past. I am simply in awe of the prodigious amount of work involved. There are hundreds of photos of exquisite fossils, and the writing is vivid and accessible to both the professional scientist and interested layperson. Mike flattered me by using the Tylosaurus as the header on of one of his articles.

And if that weren’t enough, my friend Dan Varner has his magnificent paintings of the inhabitants of this watery world on display to illustrate the vibrant and savage web of life beneath the waves.

* This painting has had a life of its own. Of all the things I’ve ever done, this is the piece for which I’ve received the most requests for use. It illustrates fossil exhibits in small museums and decorates the title page of dissertations and articles, and apparently, one roadside sign. People from 9 countries and 11 states have asked permission to use it. I had no idea.

During the late Pleistocene, lions were the most widely distributed land-mammals on earth except for man. They ranged from their present sub-Saharan homeland throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, North America and eventually South America as far as Peru.

Over half a million years ago, lions (Panthera leo) separated into two groups that subsequently had little interaction or genetic exchange. The cave lion group (Panthera leo fossilis-spelaea) entered Europe and Northern Asia and apparently remained geographically (and later perhaps behaviorally) isolated from African and Southern Asian populations. The blood of those southern animals still flows in the present-day lions of sub-Saharan Africa (P. leo subgroup – senegalensis) and a few surviving individuals (P. leo persica) in the Gir Forest of India.

For a closer look click here

American Lions (P. leo atrox) were descendents of the cave lion group. They entered North America crossing the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) during an early series of glacial advances in the Pleistocene (Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age – chart to come I promise). Like their early Eurasian cousins they were some of the largest cats to have ever lived. Males, like the animal shown here were a full 25% larger than the biggest of today’s lions. Where a big, wild male today might weigh 450 pounds, a live weight of 600 pounds or more was possible for atrox. And they had to be big and powerful. From (rather famous) remains in Alaska, we know they preyed on enormous Ice Age bison.

An unusual feature of American Lions is that they had larger brains, relative to body size, than lions anywhere else. I’m not sure just what that might indicate behaviorally, but it’s an interesting aspect of what must have been a truly awesome cat.

European cave lions have been depicted by our ancestors both in pigment and as carvings. Interestingly, no long-maned males were portrayed. There are however, marks on one of the carvings that might indicate somewhat longer hair on the neck and shoulders, and one cave painting I remember showed longer chest and belly hair. I based the mane of our animal here on those representations.

Within the genus Panthera the splits into species seem counter-intuitive to me. Apparently, new genetic work has estimated that tigers split off first about 2 million years ago, followed by the jaguar. I would have thought just looking at them and from the fact that they can still produce offspring (sometimes viable – sometimes sterile), that lion/tiger was the latest speciation. But it appears, that the leopard/lion divergence was the last, some 1.25 to 1.5 million years ago.

Drawing elephants is a lot of work, but since I don’t want to leave you for two weeks while I worry about wrinkles, I’ll put up a few of the illustrations that I’ve done for books and journals over the last few years.

Here are a couple I did for the interior of Heyday Books’ “One Day on Beetle Rock”. I showed you the cover image (a long-tailed weasel) in an early post, but there were 29 black and white illustrations inside and below are two of my favorites.

In eastern North America, Black Bears (Ursus americanus) are black. However, by the time you get reach the Rockies, brown “black” bears are common and the states and Canadian provinces that border the Pacific Ocean feature “black” bears from brown to blond to cinnamon. There are even a few special places on Canadian and Alaskan coastal islands where you can find them white or “blue”.

I’m not sure about Sequoia National Park, where Beetle Rock is located, but most of the twin cubs I’ve seen in the West were similar in coloring. Only once have I seen siblings that were as different as these two. I have to admit to doing it for the visual effect.

It should be illegal to paint a California Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis zonata) in tones of gray. Especially against a background of granite and/or pine needles these animals look extraordinary. I portrayed this one in pursuit of a Sierra Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis – subspecies taylori); at least that’s what I remember it being. At this point, 2 years later, I only know that the wonderful staff at the Beetle Rock Visitor’s Center approved it.

In Thursday’s post I mentioned that my first big Olduvai entry would be a visual history of Proboscideans in North America. In looking over what I was getting myself into, I of course discovered that there was no way I could draw and “colorize” (at least – more if you subdivide Gomphotherium at all) 15 different genera spanning 14+ million years of elephantness. Next time I review and research first, open mouth later.

There’s a whole bunch of things I know just enough about to be dangerous, but I’ve drawn lots of fossil proboscideans and I really can’t plead ignorance here. I’ve been lucky enough to get up-close and personal with both species of elephants alive today (in captivity) and I absolutely love them. I extend that love to mammoths and beyond because it seems I’m incapable of looking at extinct creatures as anything else but the living, breathing, animated marvels that they once were.

So on or about the 21st, I’ll post the proboscideans of the last couple North American Land Mammal Ages. Land Mammal Ages (LMAs from now on) are how paleontologists divide up the Cenozoic. Each has its distinctive faunal assemblages. The Rancholabrean(1) LMA began about 500,000 and ended only 10,000 years ago. It’s predecessor, the Irvingtonian(2) LMA, began about 1.9 million years ago. Both are within the Pleistocene epoch, so it’s not really going back that far, but it’s a start. We’ll worry about the earlier tuskers in the future and get around to explaining the correlations between the geologic epochs and the land mammal ages as we go. I hate it, but I’m going to have to do a chart. It’ll help keep things straight as I tend to bounce all over the place with my critters of interest.

There’s a considerable amount of wrinkled skin and hair to paint, so I’d better get busy. The post will feature all new artwork, but as a preview of sorts, here’s one of the animals to be included. This acrylic painting of Rhynchotherium (and child) is from a piece I did 6 or 7 years ago. I say from, because there was lot more background in the original image, but the animal itself was not painted much larger than you see in the linked close-up.

For a larger, more detailed image click here

Rhynchotherium (beak or snout beast) descended from earlier Gomphotheres that had entered North America in (Barstovian LMA) Miocene times (yes, definitely need a chart). Some of these animals eventually moved as far south as Central and South America, and evidence suggests that Rhynchotheres evolved there, dispersing back to the north, and lasting just long enough for me to have to include them in the coming post.

So many wrinkles…so little time.

1: The Rancholabrean LMA was named after the wonderful LaBrea site (the tar pits) in Los Angeles.

2: The Irvingtonian LMA was based on a quarried fossil site consisting of mammoths and other large grazers near Fremont, in the southeastern Bay Area of California. Highway 680 now covers it.

Last night I posted an image of a painting that has always been my favorite of the few “wall-hanging” canvases I’ve done. This illustration was the first digital image I did that I felt was the equal of my better brush and pigment work. It was the “centerfold” of the April-June 2002 issue of Bay Nature magazine (hello David and Dan) and shows the native frogs and toads of the San Francisco Bay Area.

On the left hand (water) side is the California Red-legged Frog (Rana aurora draytonii) above the Foothill Yellow-legged Frog (Rana boylii). On the right (land) side, top to bottom, there’s the Pacific Treefrog (Hyla regilla), the Western Toad (Bufo boreas), and the Spadefoot Toad (Spea hammondii). Along the bottom are shown the stages of development of the Pacific Treefrog. (The Photoshop PSD file, had 31 layers and was over 110 megabytes in size – the “flattened” single layer TIFF file on disc for the printer was still 49 megabytes)

Note: I’ve decided that the first big Olduvai post will be in 2 weeks and will feature a visual history of proboscideans in North America. I’ll start with the most recent, the mammoths and American mastodon and work my way deeper into time. It will be all new art, and since I want to do the subjects justice, it may take more than one post to go all the way back to the first gomphotheres. There, I’ve said it…now all I have to do is make it happen.

Click here for a larger, more detailed image

I’ve been told that every once in a while it would be fine to simply post an image. Some of the subtlety of the original 24-inch square canvas is lost here, but of the pieces I’ve done meant simply to hang on a wall, this was my favorite. Strange and a little sad, but because of moves and mistakes, I have no idea who owns it, or where (or even if) it’s hanging today.

Most of the images I’m sharing with you are digital pieces that I’ve done fairly recently. I have been at this a long time however, and I didn’t start using the computer for any visual aspect of my work until 2001. Here is the very first piece I did with Olduvai in mind back in 1995.

Click here for a larger, more detailed image

This is acrylic paint on gesso-primed illustration board. As happened too often in the good old days, the pencil preliminary drawing for this took as long as the painting itself. Karianne was the daughter of friends and, as it turned out, a very expressive little model. I told her the idea behind the painting I wanted to do and she was simply great. Apparently, mom and dad knew she would be and just smiled.

Taking the photos of Karianne to work from was definitely the easy part. I now turned my attention to the animal in the painting. I had decided on Megistotherium (order: Creodonta, family: Hyaenodontidae), because it had to be big and potentially very dangerous, and I also wanted a creature that I hadn’t seen painted a hundred times before so I wouldn’t be influenced by somebody else’s art. What I had seen were a couple little Gumby silhouette illustrations of the animal with no attempts at detailing. I could approach my image with no visual baggage.

I haven’t researched it recently, but at the time, Megistotherium was known from only one massive 26-inch (65 cm) skull, the largest of any creodont, and larger than any known carnivore. There were, however, dental and post-cranial remains of another creodont of almost equal size, Hyainailouros. Hyainailouros (Megistotherium, it turns out, may well be a junior synonym of this genus)* was fairly long in body and tail with relatively short, robust limbs. With this information and a number of skeletal restorations of other hyaenodont genera to look at, it only took me about 15 sketches, 25 “sized” Xerox copies of various body parts, and half a bottle of aspirin to get the proper attitude and proportions I wanted for the pose.

Looking at the piece today, except for the feet being a bit too big, I’m still happy with the structure. But there are things I’d change in the more speculative soft tissue features. Megisto/Hyainailouros’ fossilized remains have been found in early Miocene deposits in North Africa and Europe. The climate at the time appears to have been milder than today and those look like cold-weather ears to me. And I have absolutely nothing on which to base the long spiky hair down the back. It looked ‘neat’ at the time, still does I think, but today I would leave it off.

As I was about to post this evening, I asked myself how would I portray this animal today. I have a natural history library that would be the envy of most small towns, so I dug out my books, skeletal photos and drawings and found some older sketches from a few years back. Between 8pm and 11pm this evening did the sketch below.

Click here for a closer look

This was done digitally on my Wacom graphics tablet. (Warning: Photoshop tool talk) I opened a blank screen in Photoshop and started as I always do, sketching very loose and rough with a thick brush (airbrush) tool in black. As soon as I had something worth keeping, I moved the “fill” bar in the layers menu to 25% opaque, making the black a very “thin” light gray. Dropping a new layer over the first, I worked again in black refining the drawing. I don’t like to worry about measuring any proportions until I have something that’s starting to look good to me. Reproportioning (very little in this case) was done on layer 3. This particular drawing is 5 layers deep. The wonderful thing about this technology is that when the drawing was done, my final measurements told me that massive skull was just a tad too massive. With the lasso tool I isolated the head, scaled it back 10%, and was able to blend it back into the rendering all in about a minute. If I’d thought of it earlier, I’d have saved all the layers. I promise to do that and show them all to you the next time I suddenly feel the need to sketch a critter.

Very briefly, creodonts were at first thought to be the ancestors of today’s meat eaters. It’s now believed that the two families in order Creodonta and the ancestors of order Carnivora evolved from the same or closely related Cretaceous insectivores shortly after the demise of the dinosaurs. There’s too much information and too many genera (for me) to go into without supporting visuals, so if you want more information today, you’ll have to go here or Google it . I promise to be visual-rich in the not-so-distant future. Until then it’s back to the drawing board, literally.

*Something strange happens when you work with people exclusively by email. The last few years I’ve seldom had to speak or hear the names of the animals I work on, I’ve only typed and read them. This being the case, I hope Megistotherium is indeed its own beast, because I know both how to pronounce the name and what it means. Hyainailouros on the other hand: I don’t know if I’d recognize the name if I heard it spoken, because I have no idea how to say it. For a guy who deals with the scientific names of prehistoric critters as much as I do, I’m awful. I’m pleading age, never having taken Latin or Greek, and having missed the whole hooked-on-phonics thingy.

The late Donald Savage, professor emeritus of paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and just a wonderful man, once told me with a smile, “If you’re having trouble with a name, just say it with authority!” That might work for emeritus professors, but let’s just say a fumbled pronunciation doesn’t hold any weight coming from me. (Would someone out there less linguistically challenged than I am want to take a shot at Hyainailouros?)

Cultural(?) insight: As I was painting Karianne’s Pet, I was working in the front window of a little natural history/outdoors shop in the resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California. I’d ask children watching me why the little girl in the painting was upset with her pet. Girls almost universally answered with something fairly benign like “He won’t give her a ride” or “He’s laying on her doll” or my favorite, “He peed on the carpet.” Boys, especially over the age of 6 or 7 were a different story. Quite often death and destruction reigned. “He ate the cat” or “He trashed the house” or even “He tried to eat MOM!” Don’t read too much into this, it was a fairly small sample.

Thank you so much for your inspiring welcome into the world of blogging. Supposedly, when you left a comment, I also received it as an email. Well, I apparently didn’t budget enough space and my server stopped sending them along. I realized immediately that I wouldn’t be able to do this every day, but I wanted to try to write to all of you individually after yesterday’s first post to express my gratitude. I haven’t been able to do that, and if I missed you or I didn’t get an email I could reply to, I’m sorry.

I’m brand new at this. Drawing is so much easier. I’m sure I’ll get to thank everybody eventually and add links to your websites, but please don’t feel ignored; I’m overwhelmed. I’m not sure I realized what I was getting in to, but it IS fun.

When in doubt, post a picture

A few people have asked what the animal approaching me in the header is. It’s the last and largest of a group of pig-like Artiodactyls called Entelodonts. This specific genus is Daeodon (formerly Dinohyus). He really was 6 foot or more to the top of his back and likely had a disposition to match his appearance. Concentrating on that knobbed skull, I sketched Daeodon a dozen times before I colored the drawing in the header. Here are two of those early sketches. Daeodon lived during the early to early-mid Miocene, about 20 million years ago.

Now for some Weasel Words

It’s hard for me to post just a sketch, so here’s a close-up of a little long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) I did as part of my favorite ever wrap-around book cover. Click here to see the whole illustration before all the wording was added. It was for a reprinting of the Sally Carrighar 1943 nature classic, One Day On Beetle Rock, and was published by a wonderful little outfit in Berkeley, California called Heyday Books. While now it seems an overly anthropomorphic look at the lives of the creatures it portrays, for its time it was ground-breaking. The book tells of the events on an early summer’s day on and around Beetle Rock (a real place with a nice visitors’ center) in Sequoia National Park.

Long-tailed weasels live throughout the United States and southern Canada, but only in the Southwest do they have the white facial markings of our little girl here. I say girl, because the animal in the book was a female with 5 kits. I originally drew her with a rather tattered underside from nursing those 5 kits, but this look is undoubtedly better for sales.

I’m sure I’ve read a majority of all the research papers ever written on the three North American species of weasels, and someday, when I’m more settled in, I’ll bore you to tears with more than you ever wanted to know about the varmints. And as I’ve spent too much of every day in the (whatever passes for) “woods” near where I happen to be living, I’ve been lucky enough to see a number of long-tailed and two short-tailed individuals. The least weasel is still out there waiting for me.

And now for some Color…or Not

I’ve received a couple of complaints about the black background to this blog. In my Olduvai logo, the lava-colored lettering contrasts better against black and it just kind of grew from there. Now I like it, but then when I type and proof all the words, I’m doing it black on white. If reading white on black is a pain in the eyes, brain or monitor for too many of you, I’ll change it.