The depth of my love for paleoart from the 19th century knows no limits.
This image, titled “Duria Antiquior” (”Ancient Dorset”), was painted in 1830 by English geologist Henry De la Beche, and was the first piece of art to reconstruct prehistoric creatures using evidence from fossils, effectively making it the first piece of true paleoart. Even today, we can recognize these animals as icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs.
De la Beche’s vision of Jurassic-period England was a hellish nightmare, a continuous bloodbath of bug-eyed demons gnashing one another’s flesh. I absolutely love it. It’s not up to modern scientific standards, but aesthetically, it’s a dream world.
Henry De la Beche was also the first paleoartist to propose theoretical sentient descendants of prehistoric reptiles – albeit in a joking way. Take that, Dale Russell! The caption reads as such:
A Lecture. “You will at once perceive,” continued Professor Icthyosaurus, “that the skull before us belonged to some of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food.”
De la Beche’s lampooning of the popular view of extinct reptiles is still applicable today.
And paleoart from this time didn’t just depict aquatic reptiles so amazingly. Take a look at Edouard Riou’s 1863 illustration, “La terre avant le deluge” (”The Earth Before the Flood”), depicting a battle between Iguanodon and Megalosaurus.
Even though this was scientifically accurate by the standards of the time, the scientist in me disapproves of the lizardly depictions of the animals. Aesthetically, though, isn’t this brilliant? It continues the tradition of Henry De la Beche’s art, depicting ancient Earth as a constant battleground between reptilian behemoths, and sets these battles in the prototypical “primordial world” – the setting people still think of when they think of dinosaur times. Look at those gloomy, foggy cycads! Makes me want to put on a pith helmet and go look for a stegosaur to bag with my blunderbuss.
(Edouard Riou, by the way, is best known for providing the original illustrations to several of Jules Verne’s novels, including Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Spend some time on Google and familiarize yourself with his work!)
The final image I’ll post here is Edward Drinker Cope’s 1869 illustration of the theropod Dryptosaurus (then known as Laelaps) confronting a pair of Elasmosaurus, while a cheerful-looking turtle and what I’m told are supposed to be hadrosaurs frolic in the background. Literally everything about how these animals are reconstructed is incorrect, and yet that’s part of the charm. As a scientific illustration, this earns nothing but disapproval from me, but as an almost romantic depiction of a lost world, where monsters roamed the foggy forests and soaked the seas with the blood of battle, it’s something I can 100% get behind. (It’s no more of a fantasy as plucked-chicken dromaeosaurs swarming onto a hapless hadrosaur like a land-going pack of piranha, anyway.)
Do yourself a favor. Look up some paleoart from the 19th century. Go back to that lost world. Have a real adventure.
There’s so much heart in this answer.
This is my personal favorite. Thomas Hawkin’s TheGreat Sea Dragons, I think it’s called.
I kind of hope there was an alternate timeline where dinosaurs really did evolve looking like all the fucked up old woodcuts. Would scientists have reconstructed them to our modern standards for hundreds of years? Would the masses get angry at how stupid and dumpy and mushroom-eyed they end up actually being? I sure hope so…
Oh my god, that one. I was actually looking for it for the original post and I couldn’t remember its name. Thomas Hawkins was the illustrator, but the piece doesn’t have a name; it’s the front plate in a book called The Great Sea Dragons.
Top 5 things about this illustration:
The genuinely haunting image of the pterosaurs picking out the dead icthyosaur’s eye socket
The silhouette of the giant sea serpent in the background
The atmospheric night sky, with its partially obscured moon
The luminous eyes of the plesiosaurs
The plesiosaur gnashing at the mosasaur’s neck, in a way that really evokes medieval art of dragons
