Via Scientific American a fascinating interview:
Tyler Keillor (pronounced “KEEL-er”) is a soft-spoken, understated paleoartist whose work is anything but. He works at the University of Chicago as a paleoartist, reconstructing creatures that paleontologist Paul Sereno excavates on his expeditions around the world...
... Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on? (pics, please!!)
The majority of my projects so far have represented new species, so each one has had its own very special set of challenges – artistic and technical – and so in their own ways each project became my favorite at the time I was working on it.
For example, Nigersaurus was a great project because that started with a very challenging skull reconstruction and then proceeded to a flesh head and neck. This sauropod skull is so alien compared to most other sauropods, that it took a great deal of time just to figure out how the disarticulated skull bones went back together, much less how they ever could have functioned. To top it off, most were so thin and delicate that the molding process would have pulverized them; instead we had to prototype casts from the CT data obtained from scans of these bones. Restoring the teeth was another challenge, because
Fun Fact: Tyler Keillor was once a member of ESCONI - his parents got him involved with ESCONI when he was young.
Fun Fact: You can often meet Tyler and other paleo artists at Burpee Natural Museum's annual Paleofest.
