Year: 1967
The Age of Mammals is Zallinger's other major, though lesser known, mural at Yale. Like The Age of Reptiles, it is a fresco secco, painted on plaster applied directly to a wall. Like its larger counterpart, this gives it an impressive clarity and makes its colors especially vibrant. Another similarity between the two pieces is the use of trees to demarcate geological epochs. It may lack the monumentality of The Age of Reptiles, but The Age of Mammals has in many ways aged far better. Not only do the subjects remain fairly accurate today (as opposed to the plodding, swamp-bound dinosaurs of Reptiles), but the mural is one of the best visual depictions of the changing climates and environments of the last 65 million years (I'd say it was the best bar none but for a series of works that will be showing up here shortly). Zallinger drives home the cooling a drying trends that have exemplified the Cenozoic in a really clever way. At the far left, in the Paleocene and Eocene, the landscape is lush and green with tropical plants; it is, for all intents and purposes, Spring. As you move right into the Oligocene and Miocene, trees start to give way to grasslands, and the color of the foliage and angle of the light makes it clear you've moved on into Summer. As extreme cooling starts to set in in the Pliocene, the leaves on the remaining trees have started to show their Autumn colors, and at the far right of the mural, in the Pleistocene, frost and snow-capped peaks signal the arrival of Winter and the Ice Ages. The causes and ecological effects of this large-scale climatic change are one of the major areas of study in paleontology today, and Zallinger gave these changes a (nearly) unequalled visual summary over 50 years ago.
Want to see more? As with most of Zallinger's work, The Age of Mammals is on view at the Peabody Museum until renovations begin at the end of the month.
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