What Color Was a T-Rex?

What color was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye will ever see? Far from bedevilling the artists who wanted to depict prehistoric creatures and their lost worlds, Zoë Lescaze’s book Palaeoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past shows that such conundrums have in fact been invitations to glorious freedom. For nearly two hundred years the resulting genre – now known as palaeoart – has been a playground wherein tyrannosaurids, plesiosaurs and their fellows have not only illustrated scientific knowledge, but acted as scaled and feathered proxies for the anxieties of contemporary life. Lescaze argues that they should be seen as ‘roads to understanding our relationship to the past and our place within the present’. Despite these garish images of dinosaur combat and primeval cataclysm having held at best the status of kitsch, it is impossible to deny the extraordinary success of the genre. None of us has ever seen one, but who doesn’t know what a dinosaur looks like?

From “Feathered, Furred or Colored” by Francis Gooding for London Review of Books; Illustration from 1857 called “The Primitive World” by Adolphe Francois Pannemaker 

#science #dinosaurs #history #tyrannosaurus #tyrannosaurusrex #paleoart #paleo #story #stories #thestorybar