by Anna VASILYEVA, Senior Research Associate, State Darwinian Museum, Moscow, Russia

Paleontology became a science in its right in the early 19th century. Paleontologists and paleoartists restore extinct animal species the way they looked eons ago. This is a job of work that needs good knowledge also in biology, taxonomy, zoology and comparative anatomy. It takes a good deal of fancy and imagination as well. Indeed, a paleontologist is to incarnate real creatures that lived time out of mind, with no analogs in the contemporary world, all that often just from skull and bones. Konstantin Flyorov (1904-1980) was a versatile expert in this field. A foremost paleontologist and paleoartist, he produced many paleontological reconstructions; his works hold pride of place in natural history museums of this and other countries.

Paleoart is involved with the artistic side of such reconstructions. The very word, "paleoart", was first used by Mark Hallett in creating the image of dinosaurs in Steve Spielberg's Jurassic Park. But this pictorial art came into being much earlier. In recreating the images of extinct animals and their habitation medium, paleoartists proceed from hardcore geological evidence and findings. Thanks to their art we get to know what our planet looked like millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens. We learn much about the plant and animal kingdom, and about primitive man as well.

First, a few words about the background of this art. The remains of giant reptiles recovered by paleontologists revolutionized the views of the surrounding world and staggered the imagination of scientists and the public at large. Geologists demonstrated: the world has a history recorded in stone, and even

in hoary times there lived plants and animals now out of existence. There followed attempts to represent these ancient images and impress the public. Later on, in the beginning of the 19th century, earth scientists joined hands with artists. Just a few examples.

Gideon Mantell, an English geologist and paleontologist, gathered a collection of fossils, with an iguanodon's* bones among them (he discovered and described this giant reptile in 1825). This find inspired the researcher greatly, and he invited John Martin, an artist who had gained popularity by his canvases on historical and biblical motifs. So he painted A Land of Iguanodon, a painting that has not survived and is known to us from the frontispiece of his book Wonders of Geology (1838).

In 1842 Richard Owen of Britain ranked large fossil reptiles known to date in a separate suborder named Dinosauria (dinosaurs), "those awful pangolins", or giant lizards. He made their first reconstructions in detail. Benjamin Hawkins (who illuminated Darwin's narrative aboard The Beagle) did fine job in 1868: he built a hadrosaur's skeleton as tall as a three-story house; put on display in Phila-

* Iguanodon (<iguana + Gr. Oōdn, odontos, a tooth), any of a group of very large, two-toothed lizards, now extinct. Lived during the Cretaceous (140-120 mln years ago) in what is now Europe, North America, Asia, Africa.-Auth., Ed.

delphia, USA, it drew crowds. He also tried to recreate pristine animals, life size, in the park next to London's Crystal Palace.

Museums of Western Europe, North America and Russia likewise played a part in forming the paleoart as customers who first ordered exhibits of this kind. In 1882 the Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov was asked by Alexei Uvarov of the Moscow Museum of History to create monumental decorative compositions on the Stone Age for one of the halls. At first Vasnetsov read up on the matter, and talked to historians, archeologists and other specialists; he inspected tools and other articles used by primitive man. The artist married fact and fancy in portraying primitive tribes in much detail, in particular, the moods of those primeval beings. Vasnetsov gave his imagination full play.

In the 1910s Vassily Vatagin, an animal painter of the Darwinian Museum, painted water colors depicting extinct animals. This work was carried on in the 1930s and 1940s by Alexei Komarov, Mikhail Yezuchevsky, and Vadim Trofimov: they painted paleontological scenes at the dawn of the human race. Konstantin Flyorov also contributed greatly to art works on natural history. In fact, Vatagin and Flyorov were Russia's first artists to create large pictorial canvases of prehistoric animals.

A word from Vladimir Zhegallo, Flyorov's colleague at the Institute of Paleontology: "A professor, Flyorov was out of the way as a scientist. An artist all through-bohemian, august, of giant stature and deep basso, imposing and charismatic..." This is how Dr. Zhegallo pictured Flyorov in his reminiscences.

Konstantin Flyorov was born in Moscow into a medical doctor's family; his father, Konstantin Flyorov, was a Moscow University lecturer. Flyorov Junior developed a flair for drawing and zoology from his tender nail. Now and then his father took him to the Zoology Garden where the boy watched and sketched animals. Noting his artistic talents, Vagin took him to the studio of Alexei Stepanov, an animal painter. In 1920 Flyorov Junior got enrolled in the Natural History Division affiliated with the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. Still as an undergraduate, he would join field parties, bringing back heaps of sketches drawn from nature. In 1926 the young graduate landed a good job by receiving an invitation to join the Zoology Institute of the Science Academy in Leningrad as a senior research associate. He stayed there up until 1937. He published a great many articles on zoology and paleontology, along with chapters in collective works (Beasts of Arctica, Beasts of Tajikistan). In his publications Flyorov made use of material gathered in field parties in the Urals, the Caucasus, the Far East and also abroad. In 1935 he merited a M.Sc. degree without having to defend a dissertation, an obligatory procedure otherwise.

In the fall of 1937 Alexander Koz, a museum expert, invited Flyorov to Moscow to help in setting up Darwinian Museum exhibits. He made grandiose sculptural recreations of extinct animals and paint-

ed more than five hundred canvases on variability, the origins and evolution of life on earth, and other matters. Among his first sculptures created for the Darwin Museum in 1937 were Moeritherium (moe-rithere), and Paleomastodon (mastodon, any of various extinct animals that resembled elephants and lived in the Northern Hemisphere and South America). They are still eye-catchers in the exposition. Next followed even greater sculptures: Megatherium (megathere), a giant sloth, five meters tall; the Flying Lemurs Moeritheria and Dinornis (dinornithid), a giant nonvolatile bird (1938). Those were laconic, clear-cut images not cluttered up with odd particulars and frills. They were an immediate success.

Assisted by Vatagin, Flyorov created pictorial compositions on the origins and evolution of life on earth. These included seven large panels on the evolution of the land fauna during the Eocene, Miocene, Ice Age, and the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. "It is one thing to recreate a being roaming about our woods but recently, and do it from rough and clumsy drawings," said Alexander Koz about an artist's difficulties. "But it is another thing to revive in charcoal and paint the grotesque forms of remotest geological epochs, those gigantic 'dragons' that died out long ago and whose images still people folk sagas and tales... Only a zoology anatomist can cloak the odd bones of fossil giant monsters with muscles and skin to let one see the skeletal structure within. And only an artist and sculptor can project in-depth the lines and forms done in crayon and brush, make them multidimensional, and breathe in life and motion."

In 1934 the national Academy of Sciences moved from Leningrad to Moscow. Two major scientists, Alexei Borisyak and Yuri Orlov, invited Flyorov to join the staff of the Paleontology Museum, which he did, combining his duties there with the job at

the Darwin Museum. Late in the 1930s he produced a series of pictures of chalicotheres (perissodactyls, odd-toed) akin to horses and rhinoceroses; of ancient Amphiciones, the predators that were half dogs and half bears. He also busied himself with animals of the hipparion fauna*, with samauteria, pale-otragules (extinct giraffe ancestors) and chiloteria (hornless rhinoceros) among them. All these paintings are done in a light, sunny gamut. There is a vivid picture of grass trampled down by their hooves. It seems as though the artist watched those creatures live with his own eyes.

In 1941 Flyorov painted several monumental canvases for the Darwinian Museum picturing significant representatives of the Pleistocene fauna:

* Extinct mammalians common in the southern and temperate zones of Eurasia and North Africa in the Upper (Late) Miocene (~9.5-5.3 mln years ago) and Pliocene (~5.3-2.5 mln years ago).-Ed.

Megaladapis (Madagascar), Diprotodont (Australia), Glyptodont, Toxodont, Megatherium (South America). The fossil remains of the latter three (glyp-todont, toxodont and megathere) were found by Charles Darwin in Patagonia (southern Argentina) during his round-the-world voyage on board The Beagle. As Alexander Koz saw it, the bones of those animals "must have played a part in Darwin's discovery of incipient evolution of the living world".

As a research scientist Flyorov was a follow of Vladimir Kovalevsky, the founder of paleoecology who cited brilliant examples in his analysis of extinct land animals. This is how Flyorov the artist described his approach to paleoreconstructions: "Studying the bones and the remains of ancient animals, we can trace accurately enough a change of physical and geographical conditions on earth. Minor changes in terrain features or in food brought changes of

the teeth, skull and limbs. We know the teeth of herbivores to be greatly different from those of predators. Once we dug out a mammalian ungulate (artiodactyl) having low coronae dentis that narrowed conically towards the masticatory surface. This meant that the animal ate the same food as the present-day elk (moose) due to the similar dental structure, that is it fed on leaves, shoots and succulent bog plants. Comparing the other bones found then and there, we saw that our fossil beast was a deer living in dense deciduous forests. Had its teeth been small and low like in the present northern deer, we could have supposed it fed on lichens."

In 1946 Flyorov defended his doctoral dissertation and, together with Ivan Yefremov, a paleontologist and science fiction writer, went to Mongolia

with a paleontological field party. Flyorov made a spectacular contribution in describing the finds. He produced a series of pictorial landscape etudes and several paleontology-related paintings for the Ulan Bator museum. In the 1940s and 1950s Flyorov supplied pictures for the paleontology chapter of Children's Encyclopedia as well as books of such eminent scientists as Vladimir Obruchev, Ivan Yefre-mov, Anatoly Rozhdestvensky and Boris Trofimov. Members of the Mongolian paleontological expedition wrote about their impressions there and several sci-fi books on paleontology illustrated by Flyorov.

In 1947 a visual art album was published on the origins and evolution of life on earth. Its authors were lead scientists of the Paleontology Institute with Roman Hecker as editor. The illustrations were provided by Flyorov and Yanshinov. It was a folder of sheets in folio with the text, tables, photos, and pictures of fossils, extinct animals and landscapes of different epochs. The landscapes and ancient monsters drawn by Flyorov in crayons were picturesque as ever.

Flyorov did much in popularizing science on paleontology and in lecturing on related subjects. He made guest appearances on radio and television, and advised film directors shooting sci-fi motion pictures like, for instance, A Planet of Storms (1961) that had a dinosaurian sujet. Put on display at the Paris congress of 1971 on the Quaternary, Flyorov's pictorial works were a great success.

In 1965 Yuri Orlov, director of the Paleontology Institute, succeeded at last in obtaining a government decision to build a new house for the museum. The design was endorsed three years later, and Flyorov got down to painting large canvases for the interiors of the halls. The new buildings was to have

an art studio for Flyorov who, unfortunately, did not live to move in: the new building was complete in 1983, three years after his death. Being in charge of the Paleontology Museum till 1973, Flyorov published a great many works as a major expert on the paleontology of vertebrates and as Russia's only paleoartist.

To wind up, a passage from Ivan Yefremov, a paleontologist and fiction and nonfiction writer, all in one. This is what he said in his book about the Mongolian paleontological expedition:

"Wading through the endless labyrinths of reddish gullies and recovering the remains of past life from under the heavy strata of sandstone, clay and conglomerates, we probed ever deeper into the great book of geological records. It is a thrill of thrills when you put your fingers on the grooves of a uin-tathere's, dinosaur's or mastodon's teeth worn out by the food consumed dozens of millions of years ago. Or when you stand before a monster ant eater's skeleton trying hard to guess the cause of its death by the burial position. Or when you clearly see the scars of old wounds, or healed bone fractures, or traces of odd diseases. You feel as if the scales fell from your eyes to gaze back in time, you feel the present human life getting in touch with the past of long ago, still palpable. Then it dawns upon you how important it is to get to know the past. Without this knowledge we shall never understand how the thinking beings-we, humans!-have emerged...