Looking at the importance of art in astronomical sciences
I’d like to point to a recent article from Undark by writer Mara Johnson-Groh, looking at the way that artistic visualization methods have been important to ...
I’d like to point to a recent article from Undark by writer Mara Johnson-Groh, looking at the way that artistic visualization methods have been important to ...
This is an important article in Chicago magazine, “An Artist Addresses the Field Museum’s Problematic Native American Hall”. The article is a review of a new...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is running an article by Carolyn Beans that profiles the work of Ellie Irons: “Science and Culture: Painting ...
I really like this post from Matt Wedel, reminiscing about a book that made a big difference to his start on the path toward paleontology: “The New Dinosaur ...
One of the earliest artist renderings of a Neanderthal (1887), published in a magazine called The Open Court, which was dedicated to the dialogue between rel...
The Guardian reports on a recent cave art discovery in Spain: “Spanish archaeologists discover cave art to rival country’s best”.
From my trip to Gibraltar last week for the 2015 Calpe Conference, a photo from deep within Gorham’s Cave of the famous engraving from Mousterian layers attr...
Smithsonian Magazine sent Joshua Hammer to tour the new facsimile recreation of Chauvet Cave, which is called Caverne du Pont d’Arc: “Finally, the Beauty of ...
Davorka Radovčić and colleagues have published a new analysis of eagle talons from the faunal assemblage excavated from the rock shelter at Krapina, Croatia ...
National Geographic dedicated part of its January 2015 issue to the origin of art. The longread article by Chip Walter is now available online: “First Artist...
In Proof, the National Geographic photography blog, Stephen Alvarez describes his experience photographing the famous cave art of Chauvet Cave for the Januar...
The Physics ArXiv blog serves up the kind of art-science intersection I usually link to: When A Machine Learning Algorithm Studied Fine Art Paintings, It Saw...
Josephine Joordens and colleagues describe the utilization of freshwater mussels by ancient humans at Trinil, Java. The Trinil fossils were recovered by Euge...
Notable paper: Aubert M, Brumm A, Ramli M, Sutikna T, Saptomo EW, Hakim B, Morwood MJ, van den Burgh GD, Kinsley L, Dosseto A. (2014). Pleistocene cave art f...
A clever article by Rose Eveleth for The Atlantic looks into a peculiar regularity in the history of art: “Nobody Knows What Running Looks Like”. Eveleth rev...
The Mail and Guardian has a nice article about the work of John Gurche, written by Sarah Wild: “The next best thing to a time machine”. Gurche is doing a gue...
Ray Troll is one of my favorite artists. His woodcut-inspired illustrations of the creatures of deep time, especially focused on sea creatures, combine scien...
Zach Zorich has written an interesting article for Nautilus, about the optical illusions caused by firelight flickering across parietal art: “Early Humans Ma...
Jean Combier and Guy Jouve report in L’Anthropologie that the art of Chauvet Cave has been misdated: “New investigations into the cultural and stylistic iden...
Discover magazine is running an incredible article by John Gurche about the process of creating his artistic reconstructions of early hominins: “Making Lucy:...
Fascinating article in the New York Times about a new film illustrating the concept of science in art and art in science: “Engineering His Own Vermeer”.
From the bathhouse of Caesarea, an interesting double helix motif. Though there are only two strands, every third pass is colored blue.
The Boston Globe has an interview with the noted artist John Gurche: “John Gurche, hominid sculptor”.
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, has an interesting short description of a science-art project on human variation: “Looking at...
The final paragraph of this new paper by Marco Peresani and colleagues Peresani:2013 lists all the essential details:
Twitter gets results! A group of geneticists (honestly, including me) were kvetching on Twitter about this NPR story: “Litterbugs Beware: Turning Found DNA I...
Michael Balter covers a new paper on MSA shell beads by Marian Vanhaeren and colleagues: “Human ancestors were fashion-conscious”. The study involves beads f...
The Observer has a slideshow of some of the “Ice Age Art” pieces being displayed in a temporary exhibition at the British Museum: “Ice Age Art: Arrival of th...
What if you took flaked stone implements, scanned them in three dimensions, designed specially fitted accessories, which you then printed with a 3-d printer ...
Ewen Callaway compares two exhibits that feature animal anatomy in prominent ways Callaway:flayed:2012. “Animals Inside Out”, at the Natural History Museum,...
Jonathan Jones muses on two exhibitions of Leonardo’s work, one on paintings and the other on anatomical drawings (“Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a ...
I want to point everybody to this slideshow at Scientific American, which features the “The Science and Art of Neandertal Teeth”. The accompanying article ...
The Daily Mail is running a pictorial showing hominin reconstructions from Kennis and Kennis, who are being featured in a show in Dresden, Germany: “Meet the...
Today’s sketchbook:
Copy of the "Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel", at the American Museum of Natural History
I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I’ve forgotten about paleoanthropology lately. Let’s just say that the Neandertal and Denisova genomes hav...
Several stories last week related the story (from a conference talk by Jessica Cooney) about evidence that very young children had left finger grooves in the...
A piece of historical reconstruction:
The Guardian today ran an interesting article giving several examples of artists collaborating with scientists…to make art “When two tribes meet: collaborati...
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker Coulson:2011 (doi isn’t working yet, so here’s a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings ...
Sunday’s travel theme here in Rome was death.
Glendon Mellow has a Science-Art roundup for this week at Flying Trilobite, including a nice callout for my Bernifal painting.
Today’s sketchbook:
While researching another question, I have been reviewing some Franz Boas. In 1936, American Anthropologist ran a piece by Alfred Kroeber which reviewed some...
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week author Matt Wedel has two recent posts about the artistic reconstruction of sauropods. The one about head anatomy is es...
Glendon Mellow of the Flying Trilobite ruminates on the purposes of scientific art in a guest post at Scientific American: “Scientific accuracy in art”. Out ...
Long-time science journalist Robin McKie has a long article in The Observer about the Neandertals this weekend: “Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us ...
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
The Guardian has a delightful excerpt of a book about typography – Just My Type, by Simon Garfield. I don’t know if it has a U.S. publisher yet, but its aut...
The Guardian is running an interview with Pauline Fowler, whose company Animated Extras has been involved in many film and television projects where apes and...
A LIFE magazine photo-essay brings 15 previously unpublished pictures of Lascaux by Ralph Morse, who was the first professional photographer to enter the sit...
A new film to debut at the Toronto Film Festival is a 90-minute 3-D exploration of Chauvet Cave, directed by Werner Herzog. The LA Times reports on the film:...
Bing today has made their image a beautiful photo of Lascaux, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the cave’s discovery.
This is a great story about “portion sizes” increasing over the centuries in “Last Supper” paintings, but I haven’t been able to get the paper yet.
Nature has Martin Kemp review an art exhibition by Walton Ford (“Monkey business”), of interest because of the fine watercolor depictions of animals – remini...
Artist Noah Scalin gets a play date at the Mutter Museum, and here’s what he does:
Today’s sketchbook:
The Washington Post has a story about resellers of human bone and the people who buy them: “An artistic body of work’s bone of contention.”
Michael Balter describes the discovery of Paleolithic-era art in Coliboaia Cave in Romania:
Stephen Fry is a famous British actor, humorist and blogger. He recently gave a speech on the occasion of the private viewing of the Royal Academy Summer Exh...
Jennifer Viegas covers the recent discoveries at Sibudu Cave, South Africa: “Stone Age color, glue ‘factory’ found”.
Lots of cave paintings in Europe depict animals now extinct. Australian researchers have recently identified a rock painting as a depiction of the extinct th...
I didn’t see this article when it came out but I ran across it this week: Pat Shipman writes about possible evidence for early dog domestication (“The Woof a...
Today’s sketchbook:
I had the neat experience yesterday of talking to a class about scientific illustration, from my point of view as a scientist who does a lot of illustrating ...
Smithsonian magazine has a feature highlighting the fleshed-out hominin reconstructions of John Gurche (“A Closer Look at Evolutionary Faces”).
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
The Chronicle profiles a few “scholarly” tattoos, and two human evolution students make the list:
Alan Boyle reports on two new papers in PNAS. The first concerns the dental development of the Lagar Velho skeleton. The second verges on Neandertal art:
I was in a conversation last night about a book I had really enjoyed this year, and I remarked that I had meant to review it on the blog and hadn’t done it y...
One of my favorite art bloggers, Katherine Tyrell, has an illustrated review of a Kew Gardens exhibition, titled “The Art of Plant Evolution”.
Last Tuesday, in my review of Chris Anderson’s Free, I mentioned a beneficial side effect of free exchange of information – the creativity that it enables in...
Michael Balter writes in this week’s Science about the artistic reconstruction of ancient fossil hominins. The occasion for the article seems to be John Gurc...
"He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter"
Today’s sketchbook:
That image conjured by John Noble Wilford just had me tickled:
Today’s sketchbook:
On the intersection of science and art, the NY Times profiles former astronaut Alan Bean, who for nearly thirty years has painted what he experienced in spac...
Today’s sketchbook:
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK, is putting on an exhibition titled, “Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.”
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
On the occasion of the Lucy exhibit going to New York, Donald McNeil, Jr., profiles artist and reconstructor Viktor Deak. Deak’s 78-foot mural of human evolu...
It’s like the final scene in The Maltese Falcon:
Today’s sketchbook:
This is off the usual topics, but I mentioned once how poorly colors were coming out when I save sketchbook pieces as JPG. They look great in Photoshop, but ...
Today’s sketchbook:
Speaking of super-predators from the past, Natural History Magazine has a short article describing Australian rock art that may depict the extinct marsupial ...
Today’s sketchbook:
According to New Scientist, human activity and prior attempts to kill the fungus have made the ecology of Lascaux similar to a hospital cooling tower.
Today’s photo:
Today’s sketchbook:
The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:
Today’s sketchbook:
I don’t have much value to add to the “figurative art” angle to the Hohle Fels Venus figurine. It seems very interesting that there is a concentration of car...
Today’s photo:
Today’s sketchbook
Awkward moments when reading 2: Paul Mellars pulls the old “blame the dirty thoughts on the undergraduates” gambit.
Today’s photo:
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Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook:
Science has a lot of stuff this week about evolution. One of the pieces is a news article by Michael Balter about “the origin of art and symbolism.” The arti...
Today’s sketchbook:
Today’s sketchbook page:
Today’s page:
Today’s sketchbook page:
Today’s sketchbook page:
Today’s sketchbook page:
I’m very sad about Andrew Wyeth’s death this week. He was one of the first artists I learned about in school, and I have always been inspired by his work.
Here’s today’s sketchbook page:
Doing woodcuts today…
Paul Ham reports on developments which may force the relocation of rock art in northwestern Australia:
Oxford scholars Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis have a short essay about the anatomical drawing of Christopher Wren in Nature this week.
Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council is promoting some new work on U-series dating of cave art, led by Alistair Pike of Bristol University. The mos...
Paleolithic multimedia?
The AP is reporting on a new cave art find in France.
Nature has a short feature by John Whitfield about the new wave of Darwinism in literary criticism.
DarkSyde at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has done an interview with paleo-artist Carl Buell, which has some of Buell's great illustrations, along with his exp...