17 December 2019

12-19 - John Day Fossil Beds Murals

Artists: Larry Felder & Roger Witter
Year: 2005
I'm getting us most of the rest of the way to Christmas by including several of the most gorgeous paleoart murals ever painted as a single item. In my defense a) it's the week after Finals Week at Gonzaga, so I've been doing nonstop grading for several days and b) these were all created as part of a single project. As such, they hearken back to one of paleontology's grandest traditions. Back before digital, "augmented reality" exhibits (and, before them, animatronic dinosaurs) one of the ways that museums were able to put flesh on the fossilized bones on display in their halls was to commission a paleoartist to paint a series of murals to display on the walls above the skeletons. We've seen a lot of Rudolph Zallinger in this series, who was part of this tradition, and probably the greatest series of paleoart murals ever painted was Charles R. Knight's project for Chicago's Field Museum. Sadly, museums-spomsored mural projects are less in evidence these days, but there are some spectacular exceptions, among them the San Diego Natural History Museum and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Both are, collectively, among the greatest works of contemporary paleoart, but the John Day murals are especially spectacular. I'm not sure there's any other item on this list that rewards close inspection quite so much. I've visited the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center at John Day many times, and on each visit, I've been surprised by new things (the insect on the vine in the image above, for example, I'd never noticed before a visit this summer). The background of these murals is much more than a backdrop; besides depicting the flora and fauna of ancient central Oregon represented by the fossils on display nearby, they are full of details that most visitors probably breeze right by. My favorite is the enigmatic carnivore Allocyon shown as a partially decomposed carcass in the far background of the largest mural (conveniently allowing the artist to not commit to exactly what group it belongs to), but every mural in the series is packed with such gems, be they North America's last non-human primate (Ekgmowechashala, Lakota for "Little Cat Man) nestled among the branches of a tree or early dogs hunting burrowing rodents on the grasslands of the Miocene. However, the most remarkable thing about the murals is not a subtle detail, but rather such a major feature that it's easy to overlook. Just as Zallinger used seasons to illustrate climatic and environmental change through the Cenozoic, the John Day murals use the time of day. The murals depicting the Eocene are set at sunrise, and as you move on through the Oligocene and Miocene, the angle of the sun changes, culminating in the late Miocene Rattlesnake Formation in the early evening. You have to want to get there, but if you want to see a work of art that, more than any other produced in the last 20 years, really makes you feel immersed in the ancient world while at the same time visually summarizing the pioneering work on paleoecology that's been done in the area, start planning a trip to central Oregon today!
Want to see more? John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is worth a trip for the murals alone, but the Condon Paleontology Center is, as I've had cause to assert several times, one of the best site-specific museums anywhere in the world. The scenery of central Oregon is also jaw-dropping, so, seriously, start planning that trip today!







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