The Art of Extinction

Palaeontologist and illustrator, Mark Witton bridges the gap between science and art, bringing extinct creatures to life with scientifically-grounded and visually-striking depictions.

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Could you give us a brief overview of what you do as a palaeontologist and scientific illustrator?

I’m a palaeontologist by training, obtaining my PhD back in 2008 after several years of studying pterosaurs (flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs). But I’ve also always been a keen amateur artist and started drawing dinosaurs and other extinct organisms at a very young age.

When I finished my studies, I began making a career as an author and illustrator, writing books on various palaeontological topics, including palaeoart, the art form devoted to reconstructing extinct species and landscapes using the best scientific data.

I now write and illustrate for a living, and also consult on palaeontological films and documentaries, providing concept art and designs as well as notes on their content and development.

Hatzegopteryx pterosaur, illustration
What first sparked your interest in combining these two very distinct disciplines?

This is difficult to answer because I started drawing as a hobby at a preschool age and have been interested in prehistory for the same amount of time.

For me, the two aspects are now inseparable: I learn something new about deep time, and I want to draw it. This is a useful asset because it allows me to read scientific papers and visualise ideas and hypotheses that have not been depicted before, of which there are plenty of examples in palaeontological science.

For all the art that’s out there, we see very similar depictions of deep time over and over in palaeontological media – the same organisms, the same habitats, the same behaviours – but there’s literally billions of years of life and planetary evolution to draw inspiration from.

It’s fun to bring some of this out of obscure academic discussions and into the public sphere.

How would you describe your signature style, and what do you think makes your art stand out in the field of palaeoart?

I’m a self-taught artist and tend to push my way through artistic challenges without seeking advice or help, which is not always a good thing! But it probably explains why my paintings look like they do: they’re whatever approach I have cobbled together that day to make a new piece work.

I am always racing deadlines or working through a pile of illustrations for a book, too, so I never have the luxury of time for producing highly polished work. I have to admit to a healthy amount of imposter syndrome when I consider my work among that of other palaeoartists!

I am often told that my work has an old-fashioned, vintage feel, and that they look like traditional paintings, not digital artworks. A lot of that, I suspect, reflects my willingness to leave visible brushstrokes. I’m not a neat, tidy painter, and I enjoy looking up close at the great Romantic painters like Turner, Constable or Delacroix and seeing how their paintings are actually composed of surprisingly few brushstrokes.

The same is true of the great palaeoartists of the 20th century: Charles Knight, Zdeněk Burian, and Neave Parker. Knight is almost impressionistic in some of his work, and Burian could fashion a whole plant from a few waves of his brush. I wish I could do half of what they could!

Rhamphorhynchus pterosaurs, illustration
Tarbosaurus dinnosaur eating, illustration
Which palaeontological periods or groups of animals do you find most fascinating to illustrate, and why?

It’s a cliche to say “all of them” but there’s some truth to that! Even scenes from the early Archean, set billions of years ago and without visible life, are fun to paint because they’re genuinely surreal: green-yellow skies and purple oceans. It’s hard to find any extinct subjects boring when, if we look hard enough, there’s always something novel or exciting to depict about them.

If I have a choice, though, I tend to prefer subjects that have been well-researched, because I prefer to paint what we know and can reliably infer over extrapolating information to cover great gulfs of uncertainty. There are some fossil species that are essentially unrestorable because we don’t have much anatomy to work with, so “restorations” of them are really just pictures of other animals that we give a different name. Conversely, there are fossil animals, especially certain dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles and mammals, that we know heaps about, down to the position of certain scales and even aspects of colour. They’re fantastic to work with because it feels that we might be getting close to something resembling an ancient reality.

Your illustrations are renowned for their scientific accuracy and artistic flair. How do you balance these two crucial elements in your work?

Science should always take priority in palaeoart, so artistic concerns have to work around that. If I’ve put a dinosaur too close to the edge of a painting and the tail is being cropped, I can’t just bend the tail unnaturally to make it fit: I need to rethink the composition. If the eye of a giant predatory dinosaur is so small and shaded that we can’t see it, I don’t make it bigger or brighter to engage more with viewers. This might seem boring and po-faced, especially compared to artistic depictions that follow the Rule of Cool, but following the science of restoring extinct animals often makes them way more exciting and interesting than their counterparts in Hollywood or other popular media.

The Jurassic Park T. rex has been stuck with the same appearance for 30 years, while our modern Tyrannosaurus have lips, armoured heads, wispy feathers, and horns flattened into battering-rams. Our Triceratops have enormous polygonal scales with nipple-like projections and spiraling, whirling horns. Science is always providing new data that can fuel creativity, and all we need to do as artists is think how best to capture it in a striking or informative manner.

Dimetrodon synapsid, illustration
Yutyrannus dinosaur, illustration
Spinosaurus dinosaurs, illustration
Given the often fragmentary nature of fossil evidence, what research methods do you employ to reconstruct extinct animals and environments with such detail?

When we lack data for reconstructions we hunt for the next best thing, which is usually using the closest relatives of a subject species to fill gaps. We also use models of evolutionary relationships to make predictions about features that were likely present in extinct species, even if they are not represented by fossils. But this is not to say that we borrow anatomy from other species indiscriminately.

We know from living animals that distinctions in body size, physiology, ecology and so on affect characteristics related to life appearance, so we have to try to account for these, too. It’s not a given, for instance, that the feathered hides covering smaller predatory dinosaurs were present in their larger cousins because thermal loading becomes more of a problem with size, as we know from living mammals and birds.

Trying to account for all these details requires a lot of reading and consideration. Researching a palaeoartwork can take hours or days of time, and more than a few of my artworks have involved calculations, spreadsheets, and graphs!

Woolly mammoth, illustration
'Big Al' Allosaurus dinosaur, illustration
How do you ensure your illustrations remain up to date with the latest palaeontological discoveries and theories?

There’s no great secret here: it’s just checking that you’ve read the latest research. It’s hard to keep up with everything in palaeontology so it’s important to review recent literature even for species that you’ve illustrated dozens of times. And it’s not just looking for new fossil discoveries, either. A hypothesised evolutionary relationship may have changed and altered parameters for predicting missing anatomies, or we may have shifted interpretations of an animal’s stance, gait or ecology.

It’s not uncommon for palaeoartists to be presented with restorative options of equal validity and in that case we have to choose the one we think is most likely (or, in some cases, the one our clients prefer!). Dealing with all this uncertainty and the conveyor belt of new information might seem trying, but anyone working in palaeoart quickly realises that our works have a shelf-life of credibility.

New science dates everything that we produce eventually, even for well-understood subjects. Even the most meticulous research cannot futureproof an artwork against the ever-turning cogs of scientific progress, so it’s wise to just focus on what we can deduce now, and not worry about what might come later.

What tools and software do you primarily use for your illustrations, and how have your methods changed over the years?

I use Photoshop for my paintings, and have done since 2014. In my earliest career days I used other, less powerful software and it wasn’t until I invested in some better kit – both hardware and software – that I realised my technology was holding me back. This is now a life lesson I impart to any aspiring artists: however you make your art, try to ensure your setup provides space for improvement and growth.

But while I haven’t changed my basic art approach much in the last two decades, the way we learn about new discoveries has altered how artists like myself learn about our subjects. I can now download scans of fossils and 3D print them to obtain an appreciation of their form and appearance. I can review CT scans of living reptiles to understand how soft-tissues hang off their bones. And even plain old photographs are now fantastically high resolution, so I can look incredibly closely at bones I’ve yet to see in person.

Visiting fossils directly is the best way to appreciate them, but innovations in technology bring them into our homes, offices and studios in a way almost unimaginable even a few decades ago.

Balaur bondoc raptors fighting, illustration
Balaur bondoc raptors fighting, illustration
Brontosaurus dinosaurs fighting, illustration
What's the most exciting aspect of your job, the thing that still gets you genuinely enthusiastic each day?

The most exciting things are those rare moments where big projects come together: a documentary where designs have been turned into photo-real CG animals, a book is released, or an artwork is put on display in a museum. But the thing that drives all that is learning new information about extinct animals and illustrating it, and that’s probably what motivates me more than anything else.

It’s fun to take new information, package it with what I already know or can also find out, and turn it into an image. And it’s even better if people like that image, and even learn from it, when it’s published.

Do you have a personal favourite among the many illustrations you've created, and if so, what makes it stand out to you?

It’s hard to choose any because I’m probably my worst critic, and I look at most of my work with an eye for finding faults or areas to improve. But I think my style suits rendering big animals quite well, so pieces with large or giant animals are probably some of my favourite pieces: my headbutting T. rex, Giraffatitan at the beach, or Quetzalcoatlus scavenging.

I’ve had lots of nice feedback about my image of a vocalising Tyrannosaurus, which was both the cover of my latest book and used as a poster for an IMAX T. rex documentary. That sort of thing can trump any insecurities I might have about an image: if someone has enough faith in an artwork to cover the side of a building with it, it must be doing something right!

Quetzalcoatlus scavenging carcass, illustration

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