Everyone has a bad Monday every now and then, right? Here's one for you: at 7a.m. spilled an entire cappuccino on my laptop and at 7p.m. I hit some black ice on the highway and rolled (and totaled) my truck. That is what I call a rough Monday...but what a banner, no?
Carl Buell is one of the most sought after paleo-artists. He brings life to fossils. Been looking for a ground sloth painting for your living room? Carl Buell is your man. Carl and I first crossed paths back in 2004. If you start researching scientific illustrators that specialize in ecological history, it doesn't take long to run into Carl - about a nanosecond actually. One thing that impresses me most about Carl is his love for life, nature, and history. A few years back, he enthusiastically sketched a scene for me that depicted restored megafauna in the United States - our country's very own Pleistocene Park. That scene found its way into the pages of the journal Nature, and then around the world as the media reported on our proposal of rintroducing large mammals - from Bolson tortoises to cheetah - back to North America. Even New York Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof chimed in.
Now, Carl has done it again with the new Shifting Baselines' banner. What else could you ask for than a American mastodon and Jefferson's ground sloth under a honey locust tree to conjure up thoughts of Shifting baselines on the U.S. eastern seaboard? For Jennifer, Carl heads west and has added her pined over Steller's sea cow ('discovered' by George Steller in 1741 in the Commander Islands and extinct by 1768--bummer of a baseline), harbor porpoises, and some iconic northwest salmon.
Visit Carl Buell's Blog Olduvai George for some of his mind-blowing artwork.
Environment
Comments
('discovered' by George Steller in 1741 in the Commander Islands and extinct by 1768--bummer of a baseline)" And on top of that, the population Steller stumbled on was itself the remnant of the species' much larger original range (roughly from Japan to California, iirc).
And since the sea cow was apparently both delicious and easy to catch, it's not hard to guess what probably happened to it everywhere else...
Posted by: BlueMako | March 5, 2008 5:26 PM
No yurt, no truck...better take care of those skis! Great banner..
Posted by: bobby | March 5, 2008 6:02 PM
Gorgeous! It seems somehow personal and scientific at the same time.
Posted by: Glendon Mellow | March 6, 2008 5:08 AM
Oh, I am hanging onto those skis bobby - it is the best season in a decade to do so...
Posted by: Josh | March 6, 2008 7:38 AM
Bluemakos quite right about the sea cows; they used to be more widespread, and were very easy to catch. It was just Stellers bad luck to find something that was even then very rare.
Its easy to catch sea cows, and easier to blame europeans...
But this makes you wonder; why arent ALL sirena extinct? All have been hunted, nor have their been many proscritions against harming them.
(Sirena are nothing to do with Mermaids, BTW, those are seals, or a land mammal which does suprisingly well in a marine enviroment, the female of Homo sapiens...which is why mermaids are so much more common than mermen...)
Posted by: Tengu | March 11, 2008 2:00 PM
Wonderful artwork..and hope to see more and more in both the imaginative world and the real world... For fellow lovers of the recently extinct megafauna, check out this article on the flightless california sea duck and do click on the illustration of a pair of them swimming underwater with a school of 9foot long saber toothed salmon.
http://bwfov.typepad.com/birdersworldfieldofvi/2008/03/californias-for.html
Posted by: doug l | March 12, 2008 2:09 PM