Translator: Flint Smith Reviewer: Nerea García Garmendia
In all of our heads lies a time machine.
And this time machine, unlike the films, is not a DeLorean.
Or it's not Doctor Who's telephone books.
Instead, it has two main components: art and science.
And it's fuel is something I would like to call intelligent speculation.
That is to say, making scientifically plausible speculations
while knowing that these may or may not be real.
In 2010, me and a friend started to realize the way we look at dinosaurs,
the way we portray them in art, there's something a little off about them.
As we all probably know, dinosaurs are represented the world over in museums
with a collection of skeletons that are strange, awe-inspiring, and often scary.
These skeletons, since the last 150 years,
have been interpreted as the basis of lumbering, ugly, in fact, evil creatures.
In fact, a lot of this early dinosaur art was made by some of the same people
who made the depictions of the Garden of Eden and Noah's flood.
That is to say, they were portrayed as obsolete and monstrous creatures.
To this day, in common speech, dinosaur means someone who is behind the times.
In 2010,
me and my close friend John Conway started producing our artwork
and in the end, our efforts culminated in a book called "All Yesterdays".
Here's me and John, we look rather hangover but it was a cold day.
(Laughter)
We realized that the way that people are drawing dinosaurs has two main errors.
One, as I already told you, is to look at them as monsters.
In fact, even today, if you see any of the "Jurassic Park" films,
dinosaurs are always there for the shock value,
they're always trying to kill people nonstop,
they chase people like they're insane,
and also killing and dying seems to be all their business.
Another mistake, by the artists this time,
is the copying of the artworks over and over again.
If you observe the picture behind me, and on the top corner,
you see the flying reptiles called the Pterosaurs.
If you look at old pictures of dinosaurs, until even the 1980s,
you see the same pattern has been copied.
It's a two-T, bat-like, flying creature.
But none of these artists, or almost none of them,
have bothered to examine the fossils themselves.
In fact, now we know that dinosaurs were very closely related to birds.
In fact, in another TED talk, a paleontologist named [Jack Horner]
rather colorfully argued that he could clone a dinosaur
by genetically manipulating chickens.
At least he could clone the meat-eating raptor dinosaurs.
If you look at this comparison,
and if you realize that dinosaurs are closely related to birds,
like all animals, they had a very thick layer of fat, muscles,
and feathers around their body.
This is the silhouette of a common turkey, but notice how much there is
that does not get fossilized and does not get preserved in the fossil record.
Now, this is where the informed speculation steps in.
The way I have been drawing dinosaurs,
I always try to study their relationships with other animals,
I try to make them look more like their descendants,
their bird-like descendants,
and I always try to avoid the monsters cliché.
This is, of course, a very famous relative of the Velociraptor,
or the Raptor dinosaur.
In the films, they are taller than I am, and they are about killing and murder.
But in fact, these animals were rather small, slightly larger than a cat.
And, yes they were meat eaters, they were probably dangerous animals,
but like all meat-eating animals, they were graceful.
They had a kind of repose and atmosphere about them
that these depictions of fighting monsters just doesn't do justice.
And if you look at the present day incarnation of dinosaur descendants,
birds,
if you just had the skeleton of a peacock, would you draw it like this?
Imagine in a million years, you're an alien paleontologist,
you discover a peacock, and anyone who makes
this kind of illustration, they would probably think he's on LSD.
(Laughter)
Same goes with the predatory animals, tigers are very dangerous animals,
they would kill people if they had the chance.
But notice that in this day and age,
none of our depictions show the tiger in blood,
it's always a stately creature.
And the contemporary paleoart was missing this.
Also, there are behaviors we can never predict.
The talking ability of a parrot, or the games your pets play with you,
they would never get fossilized.
So we realized that there are two kinds of unknowns.
First there are known-unknowns.
If you discover a fossil and it is a strange horn,
you see that, yeah, there's a strange horn.
What was it used for?
One person could say it was used for fighting.
Another could say it was used for displaying at females.
And the discussion goes on.
But then, there are unknown-unknowns.
As I showed you, the parrot's talking ability would never be fossilized.
The bright colors and the strange casque of the cassowary bird,
arguably the most dinosaur-like bird,
wouldn't be preserved in the fossil record because it's made out of keratin.
So, look at the other details, like the ear and the blue coloring.
All animals have a character today, and we realized that in paleoart,
this character was lacking,
and people were taking the short route by creating monsters.
So, this is the kind of dinosaur art I've been creating.
This is an actual fossil, the early plant-eating dinosaur Massospondylus.
And normally, it's drawn as a kind of very long necked,
snake-like, reptilian thing.
But by considering the bird connection,
we can maybe speculate that this animal's long tail
was covered in dense, bush-like spikes, and it's head probably looked very stupid.
(Laughter)
This isn't an insult to the animal itself, of course, but this is how nature works.
Nature is more than death and red blood all over the place.
Also, we could go to some pretty interesting speculations.
This is probably a life-sized display of the plant-eating dinosaur Stegosaurus,
he's just gone "loco", crazy, and in a kind of confused moment,
trying to mate with another plant-eating dinosaur from a different species.
Now, this is once again, informed speculation.
Because, actually, in the savannas of Africa today,
sometimes elephants go "loco" and try to mate with hippopotami or rhinoceroses.
(Laughter)
Nature is confusing.
(Laughter)
In fact, this picture
(Applause)
Yes, behold the stegosaur trunk.
(Laughter)
In fact, this picture, after it was published,
a commenter said about this extraordinarily long mating organ
that probably something like this existed,
because these animals had horrible spikes on their backs
and they needed a long accessory to get through them.
(Laughter)
With this approach to paleoart, we can, once again,
add more character to animals we only know from bones.
Now, this is another plant-eating dinosaur called Brachytrachelopan.
But instead of always fighting, and rushing, or attacking,
or other bloody scenes, I try to depict it as an animal of itself, a unique animal.
For example, unlike other plant eaters, it had a very short neck,
and we think it may have lived in forests.
So if it lives in forests, then maybe, by intelligent speculation,
we can say that it had a blotchy body color,
in order to not be seen behind the trees.
Also, other behaviors, such as play;
these are two Coelophysis dinosaurs, playing and displaying at each other.
Animals were social, and obviously dinosaurs had a social dimension too.
In some of my artwork,
I go to even further extremes in the intelligent speculation.
Here we see another plant-eating dinosaur called Plateosaurus,
depicted again in a more realistic, bird-like fashion.
But behind him is a complete fantasy.
What if there was another civilization before humanity?
Now, obviously, I know that this is 99.9 percent false.
But still, engaging in this speculation
flexes the boundaries of art and science together.
In fact, this was eventually the culmination of my work,
together with John Conway, in the pages of the book we published.
To show that this was not merely two guys having fun by drawing funny dinosaurs,
a very lucky event occurred
that realized a paleontological prophecy years after it first happened.
In 1928, scientist William Beebe imagined that before the evolution of flight,
and after the evolution of the first dinosaur,
there would be an animal called Tetrapteryx, a four-winged flyer.
He imagined the Tetrapteryx and drew this picture.
In the early 2000s, a dinosaur named Microraptor was discovered,
and it was very similar to this discovery.
In this case,
art was prefiguring science and predicting evolution itself.
And we were very lucky, because one of our friends,
inspired by our work, made this book of an animal called Anomalocarid.
This thing lived in the seas way before dinosaurs.
Basically, we know versions of this animal with long, spiky teeth,
and it was a predator, like a swimming prawn.
Now, our friend John Meszaros, a very good paleoartist,
imagined that in the seas now, we have killer whales
and baleen whales that feed by filter feeding.
He used intelligent speculation
and designed this creature, which he called Ceticaris.
Instead of teeth, this swimming prawn has filtering appendages on his head
and he's just filtering small animals.
When this was published in 2013, it was complete fantasy.
Fast-forward to a few years later,
a very similar animal was discovered in the fossil records.
This was called Tamisiocaris,
but the publishers recognized John Meszaro's artwork.
And for us, it was a very proud moment
because we had actually inspired someone to come up with an informed speculation,
and he had, in a way, predicted evolution.
But we wanted to do a double positive.
We looked at all the stupid mistakes people were making
when they were reconstructing dinosaurs as monsters.
Look at this scenario:
imagine I'm an alien paleontologist landing on Earth millions of years later.
All the animals are only known from bones.
This, for example, would be how I would draw a baboon,
without any hair, because I don't know about hair.
It's got big teeth, what are they use for?
If I take the shortcut and only imagine wild savage creatures,
maybe I imagine the long teeth are used for poison.
Or this is my version of a horse.
I don't know about muscles, I never cared to study them.
So it looks like this grotesque thing out of Hieronymus Bosch.
Or how about swans? I don't know anything about feathers nor wings.
How would I know that these animals were not like scythes, predators.
And this would be the mistaken recreation of a rhinoceros,
because the horn is made out of keratin and it doesn't fossilize.
If I only look at the bones,
and if I make the exact same mistakes contemporary paleoartists are making,
this is what I get.
These funny animals,
I think these were even more interesting than drawing the dinosaurs themselves.
So in the end of the day,
as we have retro futures, now we have access to a retro past.
I just want to reiterate this fun exercise
and the value of using informed speculation in our artworks.
Because this whole endeavor of drawing dinosaurs,
ultimately, it's a fun thing,
and it's not as big an achievement as saving lives or changing the world.
But it can teach us one thing,
and it can remind us that the meaning of true science,
of good science, and actually, the meaning of good art as well,
is not to say: "I have the answer."
It is to say: "Here lies a mystery, what do you think it looks like?"
Thank you, everyone.
(Applause)