How did you become a paleoartist?
I’ve always been interested in science. In college, I studied ecology—the interactions between groups of animals and their environments. During that time, I volunteered in my local museum’s paleontology lab. I heard that they needed an in-house paleoartist. I was fully self-taught as an artist. So I showed them some of my work, and they hired me. I always wanted to educate people about how cool science is. And I’ve found that the best way to hook people is through a picture or sculpture.
How do you make your sculptures as life-like as possible?
Every time I start a piece, I approach experts in the field. I ask paleontologists, “Based on the information we have about this animal, how do we go about making a detailed sculpture?” Sometimes I borrow real fossils—bones and other preserved remains of organisms—to work from. I can measure them and make molds from them to add detail to my sculptures.
Really well-preserved fossils can provide information about the texture or color of a dinosaur’s skin or feathers. For example, we know that some smaller dinosaurs had feathers that were iridescent—they bent light into a rainbow-like effect—just like the feathers of modern pigeons. We can also make inferences about how a dinosaur may have looked based on the environment where it lived. Tyrannosaurus rex was probably not bright purple. Instead, it probably had colors that helped it blend in with its forest habitat.