Today is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath (and unpack my car) since returning from the Western Interior Paleontological Society’s Founders Symposium in Golden, Colorado last weekend. The picture below shows me in the booth containing my work, as well as some paintings by Mary Sundstrom, a talented Albuquerque artist/printmaker I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with on various projects at the day job.
This is the first of these conferences I’ve had the pleasure to attend, and I am grateful to Judy Peterson for inviting me up to show some of my drawings & paintings in the Symposium’s paleo-art show. Judy put together a roster of about 25 artists who participated in the show, including a couple of folks I’d met previously and several faces who were new to me.
Above: Russell Hawley, from the Tate Museum at Casper College, showed off some of his amazingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of ancient environments. Below: The prolific Greg Sweatt brought along his easel and put the finishing touches on one oil painting, then began two more during the one-day show.
Above: Neffra Matthews and some of her fantastic ichnological quilts. Below: In addition to his meticulous drawings, Todd Green displayed his beautifully pieced-together skeleton of a hatching emu.
Other artists (with online galleries) at the show included Tiffany Miller, Eric Parrish, and Gary Raham.
The theme of this year’s Symposium was Paleoclimates: Exploring Past Environments, and I was able to sit in on a handful of talks by various workers and students exploring the topic. Much attention was given to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a fairly rapid spike in global temperature 55 million years ago, when Wyoming was covered in tropical forests and alligators lived well north of the Arctic Circle. An analogy that came up in several talks could be summed up as follows:
Today’s climatologists : PETM :: Today’s economists : The Great Depression
Interestingly (perhaps frighteningly), multiple speakers noted that when models used in current climate change predictions were run with Paleocene-Eocene parameters, they ended up with polar temperatures nearly 10°C cooler than geologic/fossil evidence suggests…
—Matt Celeskey.
File under: Paleo-Pop, Paleogene.
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