Abstract Progress over the last 20 years in establishing reliable benchmarks in the Paleolithic of India has been uneven but major successes have been the dating of the earliest Acheulean assemblages in India; the dating of the onset of the Middle Stone Age; the dating of the earliest microlithic assemblages in India; and the dating of the antiquity of human occupation of rain forests in South India and Sri Lanka. Also important is our greater understanding of the Younger Toba Tuff and the impact of the Toba megaeruption 74 ka ago on hominin populations in India. Major uncertainties persist over when the genus Homo first entered South Asia; when our own species, H. sapiens first entered South Asia; the age of the earliest blade assemblages in India; and the antiquity of its rock art.

ABSTRACT The very first scientific paper by Eduard Suess (1831–1914) treats the graptolites of Bohemia in the present-day Czech Republic (in the Upper Proterozoic to Middle Devonian “Barrandian” extending between Prague and Plzeň). This paper is accompanied by superb drawings of his observations in which Suess took great care not to insert himself between Nature as he perceived it in the framework of the knowledge of his day and his readers. His only limitation was the one imposed by the size of his study objects. His technological means did not allow him to see what we today consider the “right” picture. Nevertheless, we can see what he saw and interpret it through a modern lens of understanding. In his drawings, Suess exercised what the great German geologist Hans Cloos later called “the art of leaving out.” This meant that in the drawings, the parts not relevant to the discussion are left only in outline, whereas parts he wished to highlight are brought to the fore by careful shading. Even the parts left only in outline are not schematic, however; instead they are careful reconstructions true to Nature as much as the material and his technological aids allowed. This characteristic of Suess’ illustrations is seen also in his later field sketches concerning stratigraphy and structural geology and in his depiction of the large tectonic features of our globe representing a window into his manner of thinking.

ABSTRACT Dinosaur tracks have been illustrated since they were first found. The earliest illustrations depicted dinosaur tracks as the work of mythical beings. With the advent of scientific inquiry into dinosaur tracks in the nineteenth century, natural explanations were sought for the fossil tracks. Illustrations of the period were relatively realistic but were influenced by then-current beliefs and were constrained by the artists’ skills and by what scientists considered salient. In the mid-nineteenth century, the first photographs were used for the scientific study of fossil tracks. Photography eliminated some limitations of artistic talent and showed complete specimens, not just aspects that were deemed salient. The ability to compare and name similar tracks from disparate authors and places became easier. Advances in photography, laser scanning, optical scanning and lidar, and the ability to manipulate images with computers, have enabled the modern synthesis of illustrating dinosaur tracks, which combines many types of images. With each advance and the adoption of newer technologies, the older methods have not been retired. Rather, we have continued to see new uses for old methods and an integration of illustrative styles. For Patrick. Your friendship and your vision will be so deeply missed.

ABSTRACT The concept of biostratigraphy was a significant step in the evolution of geoscience. Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) were key contributors to developing the subdiscipline as they worked to decode the stratigraphy of the Paris Basin in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Their illustrations of fossils, local geologic columns, and a regional geologic map played a decisive role in furthering an understanding of the value of paleontology in the service of illuminating Earth history.

ABSTRACT Our attraction to fossils is almost as old as humans themselves, and the way fossils are represented has changed and evolved with technology and with our knowledge of these organisms. Invertebrates were the first fossils to be represented in books and illustrated according to their original form. The first worldwide illustrations of paleoinvertebrates by recognized authors, such as Christophorus Encelius and Conrad Gessner, considered only their general shape. Over time, paleoillustrations became more accurate and showed the position of organisms when they were alive and as they had appeared when found. Encyclopedic works such as those of the Sowerbys or Joachim Barrande have left an important legacy on fossil invertebrates, summarizing the knowledge of their time. Currently, new discoveries, techniques, and comparison with extant specimens are changing the way in which the same organisms are shown in life position, with previously overlooked taxonomically important elements being displayed using modern techniques. This chapter will cover the history of illustrations, unpublished nineteenth-century author illustrations, examples showing fossil reconstructions, new techniques and their influence on taxonomical work with regard to illustration, and the evolution of paleoinvertebrate illustration.

ABSTRACT William Smith’s Strata Identified by Organized Fossils , published between 1816 and 1819, was one of the most important books in the development of stratigraphy; it was also significant in the evolution of paleontological art and illustration. For the first time, Smith organized fossil illustrations in plates according to the order of the strata. Each stratigraphic plate showed characteristic assemblages of fossils. The publication was a joint venture between Smith and James Sowerby and it was Sowerby who elevated the work into the realm of art. Smith had been influenced by the work of previous authors, in particular Robert Plot and John Morton, who, some 150 years earlier, had published texts illustrated by fossil engravings. The difference between these engravings and those of Sowerby shows the extent to which fossil illustration had evolved. Unlike previous work where the engravings were very mechanical, Sowerby’s were extraordinarily naturalistic. By means of subtle lines, stipple, and water coloring, Sowerby was able to achieve extremely realistic and aesthetically pleasing artwork. Unusually, many of Smith’s originals fossils are still intact and when photographs of these specimens are compared to the illustrations, the quality of Sowerby’s work is striking. Smith also selected earth-colors for the paper on which the illustrations were produced, with colors reflecting the strata in which the fossils were embedded. Although this technique had some disadvantages, it aimed to bridge the gap between science and art.

ABSTRACT In 2017–2018, two fine arts undergraduate students, Todd Rowan and Moesha Wright, conceived and created a mural for the Dunn-Seiler Museum at Mississippi State University, Mississippi, USA, under the supervision of art professor emeritus Brent Funderburk. Students researched, conceptualized, and painted Mississippi Cretaceous Panorama , which interpreted the Late Cretaceous landscape that once surrounded the university and the momentous extinction event that brought the Mesozoic Era to its close. The project necessitated creativity to address several challenges, including funding, space constraints, and a local population with Young Earth views. The completed mural engages museum visitors with a mosasaur, ceratopsian dinosaur, and a meteorite impact—illustrating the local, terminal Mesozoic geologic history in a nonthreatening venue that can improve community geoliteracy.

ABSTRACT Inspired by his late father’s thin section micropaleontology, artist Giles Ford created the Fossilarium, a series of large-scale paintings that investigates the nature of time and space through investigation of the miniature. Ford reflects on the influences of his work and how he developed a visual language inspired by repeating patterns of his father’s microfossil thin sections. The Fossilarium presents abstract landscapes of interwoven time explored through layered images that intertwine the geological, industrial, societal, and personal spectrums. The Fossilarium thereby seeks to create timeless patterns that probe different subject areas from pure aesthetics through the Anthropocene and climate change provocations to more intimate multigenerational explorations of the thread of family history, loss, and the future. Through his paintings, Ford seeks to bring the micropaleontological view to a wider audience by posing questions about the role of industry, fossil fuels, the artist, and climate change.

ABSTRACT William Maclure, Father of North American Geology, partnered with Robert Owen in 1825 to establish an experimental socialistic community focusing on equitable reform in New Harmony, Indiana, USA. Artists, educators, and natural scientists recruited from Philadelphia arrived on a keel boat named Philanthropist in January 1826. Upon their arrival, Maclure established the New Harmony schools using a modified Pestalozzian educational approach under the guidance of Madame Fretageot. The New Harmony schools focused on practical education through direct observation of nature as well as a curriculum involving drawing, music, science, writing, and trade skills such as carpentry, engraving, and printing. Furthermore, the integration of arts and sciences with hands-on experiences led to a productive community of natural scientists who published significant works on the conchology, geology, ichthyology, and paleontology of North America. In the mid-nineteenth century, hand-drawn illustrations were reproduced through engravings, etchings, or lithography prior to the invention of the daguerreotype process in 1839, collodion wet plate process in 1851, and flexible celluloid film in 1888. In particular, the published works of David Dale Owen demonstrate the increasing importance of evolving reproduction techniques to paleontological illustration as well as the significance of hand-drawn artistic renderings. Interestingly, the modified Pestalozzian educational approach introduced by Maclure in New Harmony has several implications for the modern classroom. For instance, recent studies suggest that drawing improves spatial reasoning skills and increases comprehension of complex scientific principles. Likewise, engaging students in the drawing of fossils delivers a meaningful learning experience in the paleontology classroom.

ABSTRACT Artwork in The Geology of Russia (1845) documents the extent and fossil content of several Paleozoic systems in Europe and large tracts of Russia. That artwork conveys a sense of landscape, portrays the distribution of strata both at and below the surface, and documents the fossil evidence for identifying several Paleozoic geologic systems. The artwork includes wood engravings, lithographs, zincographs, and copper plate engravings. The choice of technique was governed by the content and desired character of the images and the logistics of printing. Roderick Murchison was a master of organization who commissioned, assembled, and oversaw the production of artwork that was crucial to presenting the evidence for the Paleozoic systems documented in The Geology of Russia (1845).

ABSTRACT Professor of paleontology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, Manfred Reichel was as much an accomplished scientist as a talented artist. Skilled in mental 3-D-visualization, aided by a sharp memory, and with a fine hand for illustration, he introduced comparative anatomy to the study of foraminifera, which is masterly illustrated in his analysis of Alveolinids, and used his knowledge of locomotion in modern birds as an actualistic method for portraying flying reptiles. Teaching was his motivation, and to aid his classes, beyond multiple drawings, he created a large number of scaled structural models of foraminifera and a life-size wooden replica of the Pteranodon with mobile articulations. Manfred Reichel was a perfectionist who left a large part of his studies and drawings unpublished.

ABSTRACT The nineteenth century was the dawn of scientific and systematic paleontology. The foundation of Natural History Museums—built as microcosmic “Books of Nature”—not only contributed to the establishment of this new discipline but also to its visual dissemination. This paper will take the metaphor of the “book” as a starting point for an examination of the paleontological exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. In keeping with “Natural Theology,” the earliest natural science museums in Britain were designed as expressions of the medieval idea of the “Holy Book of Nature.” Contrary to this, the Natural History Museum Vienna, opened in 1889, wanted to be a nonreligious museum of evolution. Nevertheless, the idea of the “book” was also influential for its design. According to the architects and the first director, it should be a modern “walk-in textbook” instructive for everyone. The most prominent exhibition hall in the museum is dedicated to paleontology. The hall’s decorative scheme forms a unique “Paleo-Gesamtkunstwerk” (Gesamtkunstwerk: total piece of art). The use of grotesque and mythological elements is a particularly striking feature of the hall’s decoration and raises the question of how this relates to the museum’s claim to be a hard-core science institution. As it was paleontology’s task to demystify the monsters and riddles of Earth history systematically, it seems odd that the decorative program connected explicitly to this world. This chapter sheds light on the cultural traditions that led to the creation of this ambiguous program that oscillates between science and imagination. Looking at the results of the research on the nature of the earth, one looks into a book that contains the oldest history we humans know. With amazement, we see the wonders of the first epochs of the earth arising before our mind’s eyes, and what until recently have been incomprehensible hieroglyphs is now almost completely clear to us. How many fables may have been created by the sudden appearance of prehistoric structures in the form of animals and plants? No fairy tales, no fantasies, tangible reality now stands before us and yet no less wonderful, even more wonderful, and this miracle has been achieved by science, the restless seeker. —J. Hoffmann (undated, ca. 1885, p. 1; translation from German)

ABSTRACT Under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles Knight helped shape popular images of the prehistoric past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he was the most famous, Charles Knight was not the only paleoartist working at the American Museum of Natural History at this time. Behind the scenes, there were several women paleoartists who made significant contributions to museum displays and publications illustrating the prehistoric world. Often overlooked, this chapter highlights the contributions of Elisabeth Rungius Fulda, Helen Ziska, Lindsey Morris Sterling, and Margret Joy Flinsch Buba.

ABSTRACT Women have contributed to “paleoart” working in collaboration with scientists, using vertebrate fossils to reconstruct vanished worlds, and directly shaping the way humans imagine the distant past. “Backboned” animals of former times have been portrayed singly or in groups and were often set in landscape scenes. Women paleoartists in America and Europe began working in the nineteenth century often through family association, such as pioneers Orra White Hitchcock, Graceanna Lewis, and Mary Morland Buckland. Mainly using traditional two-dimensional styles, they portrayed ancient vertebrate fossils in graphite and ink drawings. Paleoartist Alice Bolingbroke Woodward introduced vibrant pen and watercolor reconstructions. Although female paleoartists were initially largely unrecognized, in the twentieth century they gained notice by illustrating important books on prehistoric vertebrate life. Paid employment and college and university training increased by the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, with larger institutions providing stable jobs. The “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the late 1960s gave a boost to new paleo-artistry. Women paleoartists became more prominent in the later twentieth to twenty-first centuries with the development of new art techniques, computer-based art, and use of the internet. Increasingly, there is encouragement and support for women paleoartists through the Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) movement.

ABSTRACT The National Museum of Ireland’s natural history collections include a range of large format artworks, many of paleontological subjects, which were painted by George Victor Du Noyer, the celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, antiquarian, and artist who worked for both the Ordnance Survey of Ireland and the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI). Letterbook references in the archives of GSI indicate that most, if not all of these, were commissioned by Joseph Beete Jukes, director of the GSI, for different public lecture series. The artistic qualities of the work suggest they were done at speed. However, they also are designed to be seen from a distance within a lecture hall, so an apparently crude technique is appropriate to the purpose. In effect, the watercolor paintings in this series are the PowerPoint presentation of the 1850s.

ABSTRACT Although he was legally blind, Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) established himself as the premier paleontological artist in the early 1900s. When the Field Museum, Chicago, commissioned a series of large paintings to document the evolution of life, Knight was the obvious choice. Knight considered himself an artist guided by science; he researched and illustrated living animals and modern landscapes to better understand and represent extinct life forms within their paleoecosystems. Knight began the process by examining fossil skeletons; he then constructed small models to recreate the animals’ life anatomy and investigate lighting. Once details were finalized, Knight supervised assistants to transfer the study painting to the final mural. The Field Museum mural process, a monumental task of translating science into public art, was accompanied by a synergistic tension between Knight, who wanted full control over his artwork, and the museum’s scientific staff; the correct position of an Eocene whale’s tail—whether uplifted or not—documents a critical example. Although modern scientific understanding has rendered some of Knight’s representations obsolete, the majority of his 28 murals remain on display in the Field Museum’s Evolving Planet exhibit. Museum educators contrast these murals with contemporary paleontological knowledge, thereby demonstrating scientific progress for better public understanding of the nature of science.

ABSTRACT For much of the nineteenth century, the majority of respected stratigraphers were serial creationists who read the rocks as recording successive extinctions followed by new creations, a process that generated progress in vertebrate structure. Beginning after World War I, Leviathan and Behemoth were cited by Young Earth Creationists—a minority among anti-Darwinians—as Mesozoic species observed by humans. This view spread rapidly after World War II. However, the anatomy and behavior of these beings, as portrayed in Ugaritic and Hebrew literature, leads to a firmer identification. The Leviathan of Job has powerful jaws armed with great teeth; skull armor renders hooks impotent; body armor of scales set so close together that they repel spears; water is thrashed into foam by twisting death rolls; this is altogether an accurate rendition of the Nile Crocodile. The Behemoth is a young, adult male African Elephant distinguished by grass-eating habits and an enormous, uncontrolled male organ: “tail like a cedar tree.”

ABSTRACT Here I rescue from obscurity a mid-twentieth-century sequence of ten paintings representing biotas and ecosystems present in different periods of geologic time. They were used to illustrate a 1955 book titled The History of Life on Earth by University of Vienna paleontologist Erich Thenius. The paintings were also mass produced as classroom teaching aids in the form of wall chart roll-ups. Thenius collaborated with Viennese landscape artist Fritz Zerritsch to produce these scenes from Deep Time. In terms of the selection and arrangement of animals in some of the scenes, Thenius and Zerritsch were probably influenced by well-known paleoartists Rudolph Zallinger and Charles R. Knight. I corresponded with Professor Thenius concerning his collaboration with Zerritsch, and his answers to my questions illuminate some of the choices he made. The Zerritsch/Thenius collection of paleo-scenes is a good example of the pageant-of-life-through-time genre of paleontological art. I use this sequence of prehistoric tableaux to examine artistic conventions within this genre.

ABSTRACT Humans have made visual representations of what they think dinosaurs looked like since before the term and concept of “dinosaur” were first published in 1842. Over the next 175 years, these images have varied widely. The current era of dinosaur paleobiology began in the late 1960s and emphasized scientific and artistic conceptions of dinosaurs as more active and diverse in their metabolism, ecology, and behavior than previously thought. Over the past 25 years in particular, the rise of computer-generated images and the discovery of spectacularly preserved fossils from the Early Cretaceous of China and elsewhere have further revolutionized our understanding of the biology and external appearance (especially integument) of dinosaurs. Yet despite these innovations, dinosaur paleoart is still fundamentally shaped by the same basic set of influences that affected previous, now-discarded, images. These include (1) the fossils; (2) debates about which modern animals are the best bases for uniformitarian comparison with extinct taxa; (3) extrapolation (i.e., how far can we go from the known to the unknown); (4) the enabling effects of new artistic techniques; and (5) the ever-present pressures of the marketplace.