The Brain Scoop: Paleoart: Painting the land before time
Maybe you’ve heard of the famous paleoartist Charles R. Knight– but what about John Conrad Hansen, or Maidi Wiebe? The latter two created numerous works of art for scientific publications, exhibits and children’s books for the Field Museum in the early- mid 1900′s.
I spent the last eight months digging up any information about them I could find for this video. I hope you enjoy!
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Our best-selling design is available in more colors than ever, and in kids’ sizes too! And your purchase will help me hire a writer to keep the blog alive.
And another thing! My friends at @scishowhaveput together all of our greatest hits about the science of dinosaursinto one episode! So grab some snacks and enjoy!
Every scientist’s journey is unique. Paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor grew up surrounded by science–her mom was also a scientist. But her fascination for Mezosoic avian dinosaurs and bird evolution was a convergence of both curiosity and heritage.
"This would be a way of combining my love of China and Chinese culture with paleontology, my new fascination and obsession.“ Watch her story at breakthroughfilms.org.
When paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor looks at the abdomen of a small, ancient avian fossil, she gets a thrill when she spots a jumble of nodules, no bigger than a scattering of goosebumps, protruding from the creature’s bones. Their presence could mean the animal’s metabolism supported rapid egg growth. In another specimen, O’Connor discovers an entire bird gobbled up inside of a chicken-sized feathered dinosaur, revealing a clue about the ecology in which both animals lived.
O’Connor’s obsessive eye for detail and encyclopedic knowledge of morphology comes in handy when she’s placing these fossils on the ancient family tree of birds. She credits those skills, as well as her enthusiasm for science, to her mother, a geochemist who earned her PhD while raising O’Connor and her three siblings. It was also her mother’s influence that led O’Connor to focus on geology—and to explore her own Chinese-American roots—by focusing her studies on the scores of bird fossils coming out of China at the turn of the century.
Dozens of discoveries later, O’Connor is now a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing where she uses the world’s largest collection of avian dinosaurs to explore the changes in ancient species that led to wings, tail feathers, flight, and many other adaptations seen in modern birds.
