I suppose I’m naive in the extreme but what happened to science for science’s sake?
Money is not everything! But without money everything is nothing! -- On Scrooge McDuck's office wall.What Ralph Chapman said. I know nothing about Mr Paul's personal finances, but there are paleoartists who (try to) live off their time-consuming work. Expecting to be paid for it, as opposed to having (to pick the extreme) things like the illustration shown here http://chinleana.blogspot.com/2010/02/triassic-ornithischian.html happen (read the comments), is entirely reasonable.
(In particular in the USA, where being unemployed is much more of a catastrophe than in many other countries. For crying out loud, they even have working poor over there, and not just working poor with only one job.)
You can't eat "filial respect" or "artistic fraternity".
Also to second Mr. Rey’s comments, practically every popular dinosaur book that I’ve seen that was illustrated by a lesser “paleoartist” had few if any blatant rip-offs of, or direct influences by, Mr. Paul’s work--most are flabby, disproportionate cgi clunkers that look to be most influenced anatomically by a sack of potatoes.
Seconded.