![]() ![]() ![]() On the dig, they dug up a new species of raptor named Deinonychus. ![]() The trip was led by one of Bob’s professors, a paleontologist named Jon Ostrom. The Superiority of Dinosaursĭuring Bakker’s freshman year at Yale, the geology department took him and some of the other students out on a dig. And that’s where we were in the early 1960s - dinosaurs were sad, cold-blooded, dead ends in the history of life.”ĭinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park (1852) (CC BY-SA 2.0)īut paleontology was about to go through a spectacular shift. “They were depicted slowly pulling themselves across the landscape or sitting neck deep in a fetid swamp. “The way brontosaurus and diplodocus (the biggest dinosaurs) were illustrated they were like giant, gray vacuum cleaners with very very short legs,” explains Bakker. And their bodies were these hulking masses of flesh. In most paintings of dinosaurs, the creatures were not moving or interacting with each other - there was no spark of intelligent social life. And that view of dinosaurs affected how they were drawn. They were thought of as evolutionary failures destined for extinction. Dinosaurs were considered big, dumb, cold-blooded reptiles. In the middle of the 20th century, when Bakker first started college, American dinosaur science was in a bit of a rut. ![]() Bob Bakker, paleontologist and paleoartist (CC BY 2.0)īob Bakker became obsessed with dinosaurs at an early age and went on to become one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. He also happens to be a very skilled paleoartist, and over the years his writing and his illustrations have had a huge impact on how we think about and picture these prehistoric animals. There are no photos or videos, of course, which means that if we want to picture how they look someone has to draw them. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will never see how these animals lived with our own eyes. So, on January 30, take out your pencils, wax crayons, color pens, paintbrushes, or even your stylus to draw your very own version of the most mystical creature to have ever walked the Earth.At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. Over the years, kids and adults have sketched their perceptions and visualizations of dinosaurs and shared them online. The picture is not essential, but having fun while doing it is! The idea is to motivate people, especially children, to let their imagination flow freely on paper or canvas. The celebrations on the day are simple - just draw a picture of a dinosaur and post it on various social media platforms. Ask any kid to do anything connected to dinosaurs, and they are over the moon! Drawing is a constructive way of engaging children. Since then, folks across the United States and Canada draw a dinosaur on the day and share their creations over social media. Todd Page registered the day - January 30 - as National Draw a Dinosaur Day and popularized it through social media. He decided to create a day when folks could just let their imaginations run riot by drawing the most mystical creatures that have inhabited our planet. He motivated his classmates to sketch dinosaurs too, and they all found it to be fun. To relieve the boredom, he put pen to paper and, out of nowhere, drew a dinosaur. On a seemingly unassuming day in 2007, a student named Todd Page was attending an anthropology class. ![]()
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