Hey Dreadnoughtus, not so close

I try to avoid hopping on the bandwagons following new discoveries - few internet experiences are more tiresome than seeing social media and inboxes swollen with discussions and pictures of the same new fossil species (tyrannosaurids, for some reason, do this more than anything else). Of course, some new discoveries are just too cool to pass up: Dreadnoughtus schrani Lacovara et al., 2014 is one of them. Not only does it have a fantastically marketable and charismatic name entirely befitting one of the largest land animals to ever exist (take that, naysayers), but the sheer amount of data published on it is really first class (Lacovara et al. 2014) and the fossil is truly spectacular. If you've not done so, check out the Dreadnoughtus description and supplementary material: there's everything from measurements and photographs to interactive 3D scans of every bone for you to look at in fine detail (or spin around like crazy while giggling, if you're comfortable enough with your maturity). And before you can say 'paywall', this is all freely-available, open access information. It's not just a great paper for those interested in sauropods or dinosaurs, but also an important reference point for those interested in the evolution of extreme animal anatomies and gigantism.

How the world met Dreadnoughtus schrani in palaeoart. Left, restoration by Jennifer Hall; right, Mark A. Klingler. Images from the Dreadnoughtus media release hosted at the Drexel News Blog.

I found one aspect of the very good, super-comprehensive and fittingly giant media release for Dreadnoughtus rather unusual, however: the artwork. For a media story principally being sold on the size of a dinosaur, the two 'official' pieces of Dreadnoughtus artwork by Mark A. Klingler and Jennifer Hall (above) have - what seem to me at least - some odd choices as goes composition and posture which might undermine the awesome size of Dreadnoughtus. I'm not saying the images are bad or 'wrong': there's lots of lovely detail and atmosphere in both (note the neat sauropod and titanosaur characteristics like the lack of manual claws, the concave posterior surface of the hand etc.), and this is not a dig at the artists, who have definitely earned the wide success of the Dreadnoughtus press campaign. My problem - and I hope this comes across as the constructive criticism it's intended as - is that I'm a bit underwhelmed by the sense of scale, which I'd say is pretty important for artwork of this animal. To be fair, conveying extinct animal size in art is never straightforward, but peculiar compositional choices in each image prohibit my being fooled into thinking I'm looking at truly giant animals. For example, both position the animals in the foreground, filling the canvas with as much Dreadnoughtus hide as possible. I can understand why - it says "it's so big we can barely contain it in the edges of these illustrations", but it also leaves little room for a point of size reference between us and the animals. It also forces the adoption of stooping postures and requires significant foreshortening to fit the animals into view, the former reducing their apparent size and the latter obscuring proportions we intuitively recognise as characteristic of large animals (e.g. the relatively small heads of large animals). Hall's illustration also sets the point of view at shoulder height so we're actually looking across and somewhat down at the subject animal - not necessarily what you might want to suggest this thing was bigger and taller than us. Both images feature trees immediately alongside their animals as a means of conveying scale, but I find the rest of the composition overpowers their effect. In all, while the other aspects of the images are effective, I'm just not sold on the size.

I find these decisions interesting because I think they represent a case of a modern palaeoart convention overruling 'classical' artistic approaches. Traditionally, artists use the same basic techniques for making subjects look big and important when placing them in a scene. They stress proportional extremes (including small head size - this even occurs in renditions of royal or divine human figures), use low points of view so that the the top of the subject clears the horizon line along with other elements in the composition, and place items to give an appropriate sense of scale. Positioning smaller items in the foreground can help the viewer find their position in the scene and ground their sense of size, but these need to be placed carefully: cluttered compositions tend to dwarf their subjects. A consequence of these methods is that giant subjects are often no closer than the mid-ground. An obvious exception to this are images with points of view positioned at the very base of a subject, looking up, so it looms above the viewer (below). This is a slightly different approach to the problem, though, almost treating the subject as the landscape rather than an entity within a background.

A cockroach-eye view of a titanosaur.

Palaeoart produced before the 1970s/1980s stuck to the classic rules of depicting giant animals: Zallinger, Knight, Burian et al. rarely deviated from 'standard' methods of conveying large size when drawing sauropods and other big extinct animals. The scientific transformation of dinosaurs into dynamic, active animals in the late 20th century also brought on a artistic shift where some artists abandoned 'classic' compositions in favour of more exciting, convention-defying and 'extreme' images. One consequence of this was some artists moving (frequently giant) animals closer to the foreground, turning them to face viewers and sometimes, through their body language, 'interacting' with those looking at them. The first seeds of this were probably sown by by the likes of Robert Bakker who, in many of his illustrations, fills every possible square inch with his animals to the point of using extreme postures - particularly arching backs and curving tails - to do so (e.g. illustrations in Bakker 1986). Bakker's works frequently lack the context of backgrounds however, leaving other artists to bring dynamically posed, big extinct animals closer and closer in landscaped works. I think Mark Hallett may have be particularly instrumental here, with works such as his famous 1984 'Dawn of a New Day', and the 1985 paintings 'Awakening of Hunger' and 'Ancient One' leaning towards, or perhaps even pioneering, an 'in your face' style of palaeoart where the subjects are looking at, sometimes menacing, their viewers (if anyone did this earlier, please let me know). Such artworks would become common in the 1990s, with Luis Rey famously combining these compositions with extremes of colour, perspective and pose to produce a style which has since been widely imitated. It's from such imagery that 'slasher' palaeoart arose, those images were animals are rushing, teeth and claws bared, at the viewer from within the painting.

Attitudes towards these foreground-emphasised, perspective heavy images are often divisive among palaeoart aficionados - some love them, others hate them. Fans of such works point out their utility for outreach, in that they're relatively novel, different, fun and striking, while detractors note their distortion of proportion, not to mention that many look, well, silly (I've argued elsewhere that this may have negatively skewed public perception of feathered dinosaurs). The most relevant common complaint to our discussion is that they lose all sense of scale, essentially for all the reasons listed above: unfamiliar proportions, a lack of foreground space to place 'scaling' elements, and often the loss of height associated with moving the anatomy into a position where it can all be seen behind the head (for many infamous examples, see Brusatte and Benton's enormous book Dinosaurs (2008)). Whatever your opinion, we can't deny their success and influence. such images are now a standard palaeoart convention, particularly in children's books, and have been used to showcase virtually any prehistoric animal you can think of. In this respect, the arching, frame-filling Dreadnoughtus images released last week are just following this now familiar palaeoart convention.

Thing is, I'm not sure if this practise works for all palaeoart, and especially in images where conveying size and anatomical details are important. Of course, the ultimate success of a composition is a matter of taste, and there is no actual 'right' or 'wrong' to palaeoart so long as it obeys basic laws of anatomy. But here's the beef: palaeoartworks often have a purpose - very commonly to convey the anatomy and size of a new species - but 'full frame' animal compositions are probably the worst composition to demonstrate these attributes, for reasons discussed above. Moreover, and fundamentally related to the goal of palaeoart being realistic portraiture of extinct species - how do we rationalise the adoption of the contorted postures required to fit the animals into frame? Why would these animals be condensing themselves into such weird shapes? And what do these poses look like from other angles? Wouldn't they look, at best, a bit odd? For me, seeing a restored animal in an unconventional, maybe even biomechanically implausible pose so it can take up more of the canvas is jarring, a reminder than I'm looking at an reconstructed animal rather than one an artist saw with their own eyes.

For art where proportions and a sense of scale is important, pushing our subjects back to the tried and tested middle distance would alleviate these problems, without jeopardising their excitement. Palaeoart was just as inspirational and exciting to audiences before we started rendering animals right under our viewer's noses, after all. Ultimately, while there's nothing inherently 'wrong' with any composition in palaeoart, some compositions suit certain scenes and animals more than others, and some are definitely more informative and educational than others. 'Full frame' compositions certainly have their place within palaeoart, but they're probably more limiting artistically and educationally than the alternatives.

I'll leave you with my own take on Dreadnoughtus, a quick painting done as the end result of my spate of fanboyism on Thursday night. And if you like sauropods, stay tuned, because there's more on the way...

The mighty Late Cretaceous titanosaur Dreadnoughtus schrani, making a mockery of two abelisaurids just by existing. Abelisaurids aren't known from the same formation as Dreadnoughtus, but are the most likely theropods to have occurred there given their abundance in the other Late Cretaceous South America. These are loosely based on Aucasaurus.

Update: 07/09/2014, well past bedtime

Not many moments after posting this, arty chum Jon Davies (@SovanJedi) responded with an image on Twitter which sums up the few thousand words above into one image:

The evolution of the dinosaur book cover: pic.twitter.com/ehszJQjS3J
— Jon Davies (@SovanJedi) September 6, 2014

It's funny because it's true.

References

• Bakker, R. T. (1986). The Dinosaur Heresies. London, Penguin.
• Brusatte, S. and Benton, M. J. (2008). Dinosaurs. Quercus.
• Lacovara, K. J., Lamanna, M. C, Ibiricu, L. M., Poole, J. C., Schroeter, E. R., Ullmann, P. V., Voegele, K. K., Boles, Z. M., Carter, A. M., Fowler, E. K., Egerton, V. M., Moyer, A. E., Coughenour, C. L., Schein, J. P., Harris, J. D., Martínez, R. D., and Novas, F. E. (2014). A gigantic, exceptionally complete titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur from Southern Patagonia, Argentina. Scientific Reports. 4, 6196; DOI:10.1038/srep06196.