[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Subject Index][Author Index]
Re: [dinosaur] How to draw a T. rex
It's interesting that despite Jurassic Park (movies), Walking With Dinosaurs (1999, television), and the entire corpus of artists like Gregory Paul (hello!), Mark Hallett, etc., the Knight/Zallinger way of depicting dinosaurs persists tenaciously, like a zombie's
grip. I think it may have to do with the unusually extended sociocultural dominance of the baby boomer generation, who were raised on Marx toy dinosaurs and Sinclair advertising and who I see posting vintage dinosaur paleoart admiringly on social media - without
much apparent concern for the brilliant paleoart being produced by contemporary artists.
Boomers, of course, led the Dinosaur Renaissance, but paleontologists are a tiny minority of people. The folks tasked with designing and marketing consumer junk can't get Knight-style depictions out of their heads, and don't do a great job of normalizing the
new look of dinosaurs for their successor generations.
That said, I think Jurassic Park and other Renaissance works have indeed forced people to rethink dinosaurs, but it's a very lopsided rethinking; people are catching on quickly to the 'new look' of theropod dinosaurs but are still routinely depicting stegosaurs,
ceratopsians, sauropods wrong. It's absolutely rare to see pop culture getting sauropod feet right.
Thomas Yazbeck
From: dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu <dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu> on behalf of Poekilopleuron <dinosaurtom2015@seznam.cz>
Sent: Wednesday, June 2, 2021 3:35 AM
To: dinosaur-l@usc.edu <dinosaur-l@usc.edu>; tholtz@umd.edu <tholtz@umd.edu>; Gregory Paul <gsp1954@aol.com>
Subject: [dinosaur] How to draw a T. rex
Good day to all listmembers!
In 2013 a paper came out with some interesting findings about how people perceive an image of
Tyrannosaurus rex. About 70 percent of college students drew it with wrong and outdated upright posture back then. I would like to ask, if you have any experiences with this in your work? How about 2021, do students and public in general still get this
iconic dinosaur wrong? Thank you for your thoughts! Tom
References:
Ross, R.; Duggan-Haas, D.; Allmon, W. (2013). The posture of Tyrannosaurus rex: Why do student views lag behind the science?
Journal of Geoscience Education. 61: 145-160.