Art History, Part 1: Speculative Radiodonts

While designing my illustrations, I often like to imagine them as informative displays in a natural history museum. Museums have been a huge influence on my creative life, and elements from the institutes I've visited frequently find their way into my work.
In college, I worked as a docent at the Ruthven Exhibit Museum at the University of Michigan (now known as the University of Michigan Natural History Museum). My dad had brought me to the museum many times as a kid, so the place held a particular fascination for me from an early age. Working there as an adult only increased my fondness since I actually understood the information in the glass cases.

The Alexander G. Ruthven Building, home to the Ruthven Exhibit Museum when I worked there in the early 2000s (the museum has now moved across the street to the Biological Sciences Building)

The exhibit I most loved from child- to adulthood, was the Life Through the Ages room, which consisted of seven detailed dioramas depicting life from the Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous.

I can still vividly remember what it felt like to venture into that room. There were no overhead lights so all illumination came solely from the dioramas. It was looking at tanks in an aquarium, or drifting through an ancient sea in a submersible, observing the seafloor through thick riveted portholes. As a kid, I always wished my bedroom looked like that, and even as an adult I have this persistent dream of someday making my living room into my own private diorama hall. Considering how big of an impression those displays made on me, it's no surprise that they've made their way into my art. Today I’ll talk about one of those piece. 

But first a little paleontological background. Radiodonts were a group of odd Paleozoic predators that include the famous Anomalocaris along with  stranger forms like Hurdia, Schinderhannes, and Amplectobelua.  Based on current research, radiodonts are believed to be most closely related to tardigrades and onychophorans, also known as, respectively, water bears and velvet worms. They are also thought to be related to a lineage that was ancestral to arthropods.

Radiodonts are characterized by:

1.1.)    Two spined Great Appendages on the front of their body. Several radiodont species are known only from these structures.

2.2.)    A ring-shaped mouth usually covered in plates, with small, pointed teeth around the opening, said to resemble a "pineapple ring". The name Radiodont, in fact, means “wheel teeth”.

3.3.)    Three armored plates on the head, which become large, scoop-like hoods in Hurdia and its relatives.

4.4.)    Rows of fin-like flaps along their sides that undulate up and down in sequence like the fins of a cuttlefish.

A representative group of radiodonts, which you can totally get as a t-shirt design right here.

Radiodonts were soft invertebrates lacking skeletons or hard shells that would readily fossilize. In order to be preserved, they had to be buried under rare special conditions, often in a sudden sediment slide that would leave the body in anoxic conditions where they wouldn’t decay. These burials also contain numerous other soft-bodied creatures, giving paleontologists a rare glimpse into an aspect of the prehistoric world that is absent from other sites. Fossil beds with this exceptional preservation are known as konservat-lagerstätten, German for “conserving storage-places”. They include the famous Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada; The Maotianshan Shales in Yunnan, China; the Ediacara Hills of South Australia; and the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois in the US (from which came Illinois’ state fossil, the enigmatic Tullimonstrum, a creature I’ve played around with in a couple of my art pieces).

For decades radiodont fossils were known only from the Cambrian period. But in 2009 a single specimen of a radiodont, Schinderhannes bartelsi, was discovered in the Devonian-era Hunsrück Slate of Germany. This extended the temporal range of this group by millions of years. It also provided a tantalizing hint at a hidden diversity of Great Appendage creatures that have either not been preserved in the fossil record, or not been unearthed yet.

Schinderhannes fired the furnace of my imagination. I’ve always had a strong interest in speculative biology and paleontology, and my mind was filled with ideas about what these “lost” radiodonts might have been like.

Hermit Anomalocaris

Here's where I get back to my experiences at the Ruthven Museum. The first speculative radiodont I designed was the Hermit Anomalocarid above. The design, layout, and even color palette of this piece was inspired by a diorama of a Cretaceous seafloor full of ammonites, belemnites and other cephalopods,. The look of the Hermit, especially, is based on the giant Placenticeras model that dominates this scene.

The Cretaceous diorama

Placenticeras peaking out of the algae.

The museum's Ordovician diorama also had a significant influence on this piece, particularly the look of the crinoid forest surrounding my creature. The main focus of this diorama is a pair of Endoceras, ancient straight-shelled relatives of the chambered nautilus. One of them has flipped over a trilobite and is in the process of devouring it- inspiring my Hermit Anomalocarids' attack on a horseshoe crab relative.. When I was real young, I recall that this model would actually move its tentacles up and down when you stepped on a pad in front of the diorama. The mechanism broke at some point before I got to college and was never fixed. Most of the people I've mentioned this feature to do not remember it, but I swear it was true!

The Ordovician diorama

The nautilus-relative Endoceras devouring a trilobite.

The Ruthven Museum had a ton of exhibits that influenced my artwork. I'll talk more about other pieces in future posts.