Studying The Dead To Understand Life: Gary Staab (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Paleoartist Gary Staab’s talk titled “Studying The Dead To Understand Life” at TEDxKC 2024 conference.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Contemplating Deep Time

GARY STAAB: If you could travel back in time, where would you go? How far back would you let your mind wander? We, as large brained primates, are pretty good at understanding about a hundred years, roughly a human lifetime. We’re less good at thinking about deep time. That is the time before recorded history.

Here’s something to get at your bearings. Imagine the whole of Earth history as the distance between your outstretched arms. Starting 4.5 billion years ago, here, we travel up our timeline until the first life appears 3.7 billion years ago. Now, at this point, you might want to get a comfortable chair and a good book because we have to wait another 3.1 billion years until the first life appears that has something that looks like a backbone. That’s 530 million years ago.

Dinosaurs show up on the scene 230 million years ago. That’s right at the base of my finger. Dinosaurs go extinct 66 million years ago, the last segment of my finger. Anatomically modern humans, us, show up about 300,000 years ago, and that’s for the very end of my finger. And the whole of human history can be erased with a nail clipper.

Studying deep time fosters an appreciation for the amazing life that lives on earth. The complexity and diversity of the organisms and environments that have survived and our brevity amongst them is truly humbling.

The Role of a Paleo Artist

My job as a paleo artist is to put the flesh on the bones of extinct animals. I do this by time traveling with scientists. Sometimes this takes me to where horrible things have happened.

I follow in the wake of glaciers, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts and mass extinctions. In short, anywhere where animals, humans or their artifacts are unlucky enough to be preserved in exceptional detail. I’m sort of a prehistoric ambulance chaser. It’s just I’m a little late to the scene.

Case in point, I was commissioned to create five of the ash figures from Pompeii, Italy. The preservation in Pompeii is exceptional because Mount Vesuvius erupts in 79 AD and rains ash down on the city and its inhabitants. As the ash fell, it compacted around the people who couldn’t escape and preserved their final moments. The figures are so fragile that they can’t be moved, so I used photos to create a 3D model and then made the final finishes in plaster and epoxy.

The Process of Fossilization

Other than being buried by volcanic ash, there’s other ways you can be preserved for posterity. One of those is to become a fossil.

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To become a fossil, first, you need to be dead. Second, you need to die in a specific place, preferably a place where you can be covered up, so scavengers can’t spread your bones around. And third, you need to give it some time. Over many years, minerals from the surrounding ground water and sediment replace the composition of your bone to create a fossil. Vertebrate fossils are very rare.

Less than one percent of all of the animals that have ever lived are going to be preserved as fossils. That’s why it’s really important that we learn as much as we can from the incredible fossils that we do have.

The Artistic Process

The first part of any project for me is to learn as much as I can about the subject. The more I can learn about this dead animal, the closer to life I can bring it. My subject matter can vary in size and complexity, like this tiny dinosaur about the size of a chicken called Sinosauropteryx from China, and the first one of the first dinosaurs discovered with feathers.

To some of the largest animals to ever live on Earth, like this Quetzalcoatlus with a 30-foot long wingspan at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Or this immense Megalodon, 52 feet long, that my team and I made for the National Museum of Natural History, or some of the biggest animals to ever walk on Earth, like this life-sized Camarasaurus for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

All of these sculptures initially are made in clay, but they can be cast in a lot of different materials, it really just depends on what final effect you’re trying to achieve. Like this 40-foot long crocodile called Sarcosuchus found in the Sahara Desert, or this life size Colombian mammoth cast in bronze.

Sometimes, it’s the physical scale of the projects that is the greatest challenge. When I first started doing sculpture, I never anticipated having to worry about the heights of overpasses or stoplights. I’ve spent a really large part of my career trying to figure out how to get really large animals through small doors.

The Evolution of Art and Communication

As long as artists have had a way to do it, they’ve captured and created images of the world around them. It’s likely that art and language co-evolved as a means of communication, and in some ways art has always been a way to express ideas. The thing that’s different between a fine artist and a museum artist is that a fine artist is rewarded for showing a particular style.

When you see this painting, you know it’s Picasso because of its style. My job as a museum artist is to completely disappear. In fact, I failed at my job if you can see my hand in the making of the object. Paleo art endeavors to interpret complicated science about Earth history and present it in a way that we can all relate to today. Digging with scientists is one of the is an incredible experience, and I get a huge charge of inspiration by spending time with scientists in the field.

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Reconstructing Extinct Animals

So how do you begin to visualize an animal that no human has ever seen?

Well, we start with what we have, the fossil bones. A skeleton can tell us a lot about an animal. Muscle scars on the bones can tell us the size of the muscles and where they were placed. The articular surfaces of the bones can give us a sense of the range of motion.

Fossil bones can actually be sliced and the layers counted like rings on a tree to give a sense of how old that animal was when it died, which in turn gives us clues about their metabolism. Bones preserved around the eyes of certain dinosaurs give us a sense of how big the eyes were and how good their eyesight may have been. The shape of the teeth tell us if it ate plants or other animals. Isotopes preserved in the enamel of the teeth can actually tell us what plants and what animals were eaten. There’s even great skin impressions of certain groups of dinosaurs preserved.

So if we couple all of this information together and we pair it with the knowledge gained by the dissection of modern animals and the study of their locomotion, we have the framework to build an extinct animal. And if you’re lucky, your animal is complete as this one called Yutyrannus from China. I start by making a small scale clay sculpture, scan that to digitize it and then mill it at full scale, 21 feet and set it on a steel structure. This particular dinosaur was covered with feathers. All of the feathers are applied one by one starting at the tail and working towards the head, just like shingles on a roof.

Do that 250,000 times and you’re done. This is a great time to mention all of the incredible help I’ve had from studio assistants over the years. It takes a lot of hands to make big sculptures.

Archaeological Reconstructions

My work not only includes paleontological, but also archaeological work as well. I was commissioned by National Geographic to create the mummy of Tutankhamun. I used CT scan data to make a three-dimensional print, and then traveled to Egypt to go to the Valley of the Kings and descended into the tomb to gather measurements off of the mummy and gather inspiration to create this model for a traveling exhibition.

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I was also lucky enough to be asked to recreate the mummy of the Iceman, otherwise known as Ötzi. Again, using CT data to create a three-dimensional print, I went to Italy to spend time in the freezer with the mummy to study it, all in an effort to make a replica that was so accurate it could be studied outside of the freezer.

When putting flesh on our most ancient ancestors, it’s a muscle by muscle approach, as was the case with Australopithecus afarensis or Lucy. Lucy was really intimidating to work on because the stack of scientific literature published about her is about as tall as she is.

When working on anatomically modern humans, like this skull from a site in the Sahara called Gobero, I used 21 different points of the skull that are acknowledged by skin depth tissue averages. It’s a long process and it takes a lot to get to the final product, but there’s a part of the process where the technique falls away. The sculpture becomes a person looking back at you for the first time.

The Importance of Creativity and Understanding Our Past

Creativity is the defining character of our species. No other animal has the ability to envision lost worlds and use art and science to fill in the gaps of our story.

Ultimately, the goal is self-understanding. And art has always been the tool to help us locate our place in time and to tell us who in the world we are. I study the dead so I can understand life, and hopefully elicit wonder and awe and respect for the amazing planet that we live on.

Just think, to get here today, every single one of you has won the evolutionary lottery. All of the generations of your ancestors have survived predators, cataclysms, and extinctions to continue the long genetic line that’s led to you.

Reaching across time allows us to understand that we are all part of a common ancestral lineage. Having that understanding gives each of our brief lives a bit of grandeur and all of our lives greater connection. Some essential part of you has traveled from deep time to arrive here. Understanding the past can help us shape and survive the future and whatever it might bring. Let’s get our arms around it.

We can do this. Thank you.