Sprecher
Beschreibung
The depiction of plants in palaeoart is key to communicating to diverse audiences about life in the deep past. Palaeoart today tends to focus on animals, particularly on tetrapods, and this can be seen as part of the broader issue of zoochauvinism within science communication and popular culture more generally. However, it is within the field of palaeozoological art that much thoughtful work has been undertaken to identify best practices, and to systematise the process of creating such art from fossil evidence. Principles such as phylogenetic bracketing provide artists with a framework for making objective decisions about how to present anatomy for which fossil evidence is absent. This is an evidence-based speculative approach. And while the process of reconstructing and depicting a vertebrate's anatomy - from skeleton, to soft tissues, to integument - is fundamentally different from how plants should be reconstructed, there are pipelines that could be applied to palaeobotanical art, both at the level of whole-plant conceptualisations and for landscape palaeoart. The development of similar shared principles for palaeobotanical art would allow artists greater licence to speculate, and to produce creative, thought-provoking, and exciting artworks with confidence. Accuracy in palaeobotanical art is important, but moving towards a model where the plants depicted are biologically tenable but not limited to the safe, well-rehearsed and repeated reconstructions derived directly from illustrations in scientific papers could reinvigorate popular interest in plants from deep time.