I saw a handful of palaeontology stories on the BBC website this week that made me smile. The first one informed us that Archeopteryx “wore feather trousers for display”.
I love the way that they can confidently deduce the entire colour scheme on the right from the fossil on the left. And I’m also amazed that anyone could make a living out of mocking up these creatures (if you look closely in the link, the feathered one on the right is a collection of bits of modern birds glued on to a model).
The second story concerned the “largest flying bird” ever.
This time, we get an artist’s impression rather than an actual model – look closely at the beak region and marvel at what appears to be an Albatross with teeth added.
The third story – and this link is not on the BBC, though that’s where I first saw it – provides a video showing how a 440 million year old spider would have walked.
The amusing thing about this is that the video gives the impression of a creature the size of a small dog, when in actual fact the spider in question was only a few millimetres long. I can’t imagine an arachnid that small moving in a similar manner to an elephant!
Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that the steps involved in creating a mock-up of anything that’s extinct are as follows:
- select a modern animal to compare against
- change the environmental context as necessary
- pick the most bizarre colour palette you can find in Photoshop
- add some teeth
You will note how I have demonstrated this using a cuddly Toucan. In its normal setting, it looks just like a Toucan should.
However, by applying the above steps, you can see how a prehistoric version – toucanosaurus – would have looked if it had walked into New York (it couldn’t have flown, as it would obviously have been flightless back then). This is a definite likeness of such a prehistoric Toucan if one ever existed, by the way.
I mean, who can prove otherwise?