Drawing with dinosaurs: in praise of the artist's impression

Guardian.co.uk:. Jonathan Jones on Art: Drawing with dinosaurs: in praise of the artist's impression
Art is not only for artists. Painting and drawing have uses that go way beyond the needs of art galleries – like portraying dinosaurs, for example. A while ago at the Natural History Museum in London I heard a great talk by a palaeontologist – I wish I had made a note of his name – about his specialism, which is creating pictures of extinct animals based on their fossil remains. How can you reconstruct, from the evidence of a spiralling stone shell, the soft, living body of an Ammonite? He showed how comparison with a modern animal, the Nautilus, can help, and challenged the audience to sketch our own idea of an Ammonite.

Books on dinosaurs and other ancient life forms are full of artist's impressions, painted and digitally generated. Our longing to see these vanished creatures for real drives an endless industry of re-creation in which intense visual imagination is brought to bear on the dead stone traces of the antediluvians. From Walking with Dinosaurs to David Attenborough's First Life, the techniques of the artist and animator serve science.

This goes back at least to the 19th century when the painter John Martin drew fantastic scenes of life in the Jurassic seas, whose fossils were then being rediscovered by heroic fossil hunters in the cliffs of Lyme Regis. In Martin's teeming ocean monstrous ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs confront one another like mythic dragons. And Martin was in fact a painter of apocalyptic vision: today he is renowned for his lurid paintings of the end of the world, in which blazing clouds boil and innumerable crows fall into the abyss. His dark mind sees the prehistoric past too as an inferno of chaotic biological experiments – the sea of Hell.

Modern scientific renditions of the prehuman world might seem far more careful and realistic. But it is amazing how rapidly ideas about the appearance of dinosaurs change – the theory that dinosaurs had feathers being the most renowned recent revision. This is about new fossil discoveries but it also has to be about imagination. It seems unlikely the world's imagination will ever really give up on the idea of scaly dinosaurs, however much feathery fossil evidence is found.

The strangest picture I have ever seen of a now-extinct animal is more accurate than any conceivable modern reconstruction – because it was done from life. To look on a cave painting of a mammoth is to see what the eyes of an early human saw, when monsters still roamed the Earth. Hair and tusks, force and otherness – a wild beast drawn from nature – confront you. Perhaps, when artists, scientists and animators try to picture the animals of lost worlds, they are channelling an ancient instinct: it is the caveman within who holds the brush.