Once again the NYTimes has run an article about the discovery of a new animal complete with action painting. Who are these artists and how did they get into this fantastic line of work?
As for the newly discovered mammal:
"...the scientists say it shows that mammals experimented with aerial life about the same time birds first took to the skies, perhaps even earlier."
4 comments:
Whoa. That little flying thing appears to be attacking a long-tailed tree-climbing duckbilled platypus.
Yes. Godspeed to it; I fear it's overmatched! Becky, I read an awesome book about paleontological artists in the nineteenth c. in Britain. _Scenes from Deep Time_, Martin Rudwick. I get the impression a lot of them were these gentlemanly scientific dabblers, renaissance men, who wanted to see these things "come to life." Then that awesome dino book that killed my desire to write about dinos, WJT Mitchell _The Last Dinosaur Book_, has a long section on how dino art gets segregated from "real" art and would never make it into any "real" art museum - a dino being the kiss of death for avant-gard-ish-ness, unless it's kitsch - and what that means. Oh man, I loved that book.
There's a longer article about this in Nature.
Making the paper: Jin Meng
How a fossil helped to redraw the mammalian family tree.
I didn't pull it up, but their articles are usually pretty readable/accessible.
"Rocky Balboa?" was my first response, and then I realised that you guys have a cartoon squirrel character called Rocky. The scales lifted...
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