We met in Warren's office in early February, a room full of windows, books and paleo-kitsch, located on the main floor of PRI. The Institution's original building, a slightly Gothic stone structure, was built in 1926-27 to be an orphanage: the Odd Fellow's Home for Children. The spacious modern Museum of the Earth was opened next to the existing building in 2003.

"It started when I was 3, and went to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum," Warren said when asked how he first became interested in paleontology. Even with a "brief flirtation with the Civil War" during his childhood, he was "always a dinosaur geek…everyone starts out as a dinosaur fan, until the hormones kick in. If you're still interested at age 13, then it’s serious. I discovered the science behind the fossils." Warren grew up in upstate South Carolina where there are no fossils, a sad situation for a young collector. His parents, however, recognized and were very supportive of his enthusiasm. They arranged for him to go fossil hunting farther afield, and to take classes in paleontology. Warren’s mother even audited a class to understand what her son was interested in. In a scene which will probably be familiar to the artists in the audience, his father asked "but how will you make a living doing this?" right up until he received a doctoral fellowship to Harvard. With a bit of foreshadowing for his later life, Warren's fossil collection became a sort of museum in the basement of his parents' home, with wooden cases and thousands of specimens, a field-trip destination for local school children. This collection was eventually donated to the Science Center in Greenville, and Warren now claims that although he is in charge of an extensive fossil collection at PRI, he no longer has a personal collection.

I had read in his biography that Warren specialized in snails. How did this happen? During one of these youthful fossil-collecting trips, at the Calvert Cliffs on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, Warren discovered a fossil snail he did not recognize. At age 14, he boldly wrote to the Smithsonian to inform them that he had discovered a species new to science. In the end it was not a new species after all, but his research led to a study during grad school that was published as a large monograph through PRI – Warren's first connection with the Institution. Warren says that of course the big exciting vertebrates are more interesting to almost everyone, but the sample size is small. More interesting evolutionary science can be made from more plentiful invertebrate collections. Warren also had no interest in taking Gross Human Anatomy in college, a prerequisite for vertebrate study.

Since I am a scientific illustrator gathering information for other illustrators, I asked him if there were any formative books or favorite illustrations he remembers from his youth? Warren grinned, went to one of the stacks of books on the floor and pulled out a copy of the How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs, illustrated by Kenyan Shannon. It was sandwiched between some more weighty scientific tomes. "I remember every illustration in this book," he says. There weren't a lot of dinosaur books around when he was growing up, this was before dinosaurs really became part of the popular culture and started showing up on everything from pajamas to pasta. He also collected the classic plastic figurines of dinosaurs manufactured by the Marx Toy Company.

This led to a question of how he feels science and art work together. I know that Warren is a big fan of scientific illustration. "Paleontology has a special symbiotic relationship to art," he said, because the things that are being studied do not exist any more except in fragments and fossils.  "A photo of a long-dead fossil plant just doesn’t do it," whereas an illustrated reconstruction really means something, makes the specimen look alive, and it's the only way to see what the species being studied looked like. "Artists often lead the way for the scientists," he says, because the scientist really might not know how something looks until the artist creates an illustration based in the information they gather ("something has to go on the paper"). Those illustrations then drive both scientific and popular perception. Of course, there is the full spectrum of paleo art, from straight illustration of a specimen, as it exists, to careful reconstructions, to conjecture and fancy, and on down the "slippery slope to Barney." Interestingly, he says that the first question a group of kids will ask about dinosaurs is what color they were.  No one really knows, but the artists who have being paintings dinosaurs have been making decisions about that for years.  So, has he ever tried his hand at illustration? "Oh gosh (eye roll), all paleontologists have…usually drawing is required for classes and field notes, to force you to really look at what you’re studying. I can't draw anything, that's why I'm so fascinated with scientific illustrators." 

Warren is currently co-authoring a book with Peter Dodson (of the University of Pennsylvania) about the interaction of science and culture through the medium of art. It is called Dinosaur Visions –A History of the Struggle of Art and Science to Visualize the Life of the Past. The book has been in progress for several years. Several editors became inspired by a lecture by Dr. Dodson on horned dinosaurs during which he mentioned the cultural pressure to draw them with the legs straight underneath--the science says that, maybe, they should be drawn with their legs to the side. Warren attended that lecture, and apparently rushed the podium afterwards with the idea to write this book. Since then it has expanded to include a history of scientific art, a retrospective of how dinosaurs have been portrayed over the last several years, human fossil reconstruction and the accompanying social pressures, and a discussion of realism and technology and how popular expectations have increased since Jurassic Park. Of course it will be lavishly illustrated. Warren will be giving us an overview of his book and the interaction between art, science and culture in the keynote address.

When Warren took over the directorship of PRI in 1992 there was a very small staff and some very large fossil collections, but no way for the public to learn from this rich storehouse. In the intervening years, he has helped it grow to include a world-class museum. The Museum of the Earth (quoting here from their Web site) "contains 8000 square feet of permanent exhibits, telling the history of life on Earth through the geological record of the Northeastern U.S." Warren says that the thing he is most proud of about the museum is that it is "a place about the science …there's a lot of information being presented that has real content." When the museum was being planned, he wanted to be sure that there was something for everyone.  "Ithaca is a very diverse community, there are farmers, students, Laotian refugees…so the information and the presentation has to be broad." Art is often a theme of the exhibits, and there is a permanent installation of mixed-media tiles by Barbara Page that show the history of the earth in 1 million year increments. An upcoming exhibit on fossils from the Green River Formation in Wyoming will feature sketches by local GNSI members (we were welcomed for a fun afternoon of sketching in the collections last December). During the conference the museum will be hosting "Hatching the Past," an interactive exhibit about dinosaur eggs, nests and young.

Links:
Paleontological Research Institution: www.priweb.org 
Museum of the Earth:www.museumoftheearth.org
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