See Stunning Illustrations of Prehistoric Life From One of the Most Renowned Paleoartists in the World

Riley Black

Science Correspondent

When you open the cover of Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter, the title page painting might seem somewhat strange. Gathered around the edge of a lake are striped horses, like zebras but more svelte. A pelican sits before them just above some lily pads, as if the scene could be from somewhere in East Africa today. But the elephants cavorting in the water in the background don’t look right for African elephants. The heads of the pachyderms are low and rounded, their tusks bearing a peculiar curve to them, and their ears are too small. The beasts are mastodons, the key clue that the scene is not from a time we know but from the Pliocene, more than three million years ago, in what’s now Idaho. The piece is a slice of ancient time that is so lovingly detailed it seems familiar, a magic that artist Jay Matternes has brought to paleo and wildlife art through a long and storied career. The new book celebrates his incomparable oeuvre.

Written with author Richard Milner and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, the book is presented as a long-overdue highlight reel of Matternes’ stellar work. “Although his name was unknown to the general public, Jay’s work has entranced and educated millions who grew up with this six murals of mammal evolution at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and his paintings at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,” Milner says, adding that Matternes’ paintings have repeatedly appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Scientific American, Science and others. Matternes has the credentials to be mentioned in the same breath as paleo and wildlife artists who left their mark on the discipline like Charles R. Knight and Zdeněk Burian. Matternes’ skill at restoring the lives of fossil humans was especially informed by his close attention to modern primates and other animals. From drawing the gorillas being studied by Dian Fossey in Rwanda to artistically fleshing out prehistoric mammals from bone to muscle to life appearance, Matternes has captured everything from real-life moments to scenarios we are millions of years too late to see.

The book got its start back in 1989. At the time, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall and designer Willard Whitson commissioned Matternes to paint primate evolution murals for the American Museum of Natural History. Discussions led to the possibility of a book about how understanding of prehistoric life has changed through Matternes’ paintings. The effort led him to get in touch with editor Richard Milner, who’d already published a book on Matternes’ childhood idol Charles R. Knight. “I was delighted when Richard accepted,” Matternes says. Eventually, the book morphed into more of a biographical collection of the artist’s phenomenal career.

From the time he was a child in a military family stationed in the Philippines before moving to other bases in the 1930s and ‘40s, Matternes would draw and sketch for hours on end. Movies, newspaper photos and local settings fueled his imagination, the book recounts, but a key inspiration was Knight, well-known for wildlife art and paleo pieces done for various museums. A 1946 visit to the Bronx Zoo and New York’s American Museum of Natural History were particularly formative, Matternes recalls, nudging him to become a professional wildlife artist rather than follow in his father’s footsteps in medicine. The decision would lead to some of the most detailed and evocative wildlife art ever composed.

Organized by concept rather than chronology, Milner’s book highlights Matternes’ enduring classics alongside lesser-known pieces and behind-the-canvas sketches. Being able to observe dissections of gorillas, orangutans and other animals from zoos, for example, gave Matternes an excellent grounding as a comparative anatomist who is able to build out the look of a creature from the bones to the skin.

In 1958, while still in the Army, Matternes did some freelance artistic work for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The museum’s paleontology staff had been planning for a major renovation, part of which would involve multiple murals of well-known communities of prehistoric mammals. Smithsonian curator C. Lewis Gazin invited Matternes to apply for the project, and he took the job. But Matternes drew from such detailed anatomical knowledge that he sometimes frustrated the scientists he was working with. While working on art of the 50-million-year-old fossil mammal Uintatherium—a four-legged herbivore about the size of a rhino with saber teeth and three pairs of knobby horns on its head—Matternes restored the mammal with upright, pillar-like limbs instead of sprawling ones like the fossil mount in the museum. “Damn it, Matternes, it would be much better if you made your paintings correspond to the skeletal mounts in the hall, rather than require expensive repositioning of the skeletons to match your paintings,” the researcher reportedly griped, but of course Matternes’ interpretation of the bones was correct.

Of all his subjects, however, Matternes is probably best known for his illustrations of fossil humans. In the mid-1960s, Time-Life Books commissioned Matternes to create illustrations for a volume by anthropologist F. Clark Howell called Early Man. No one had seen depictions of early humans as realistic as Matternes’ before, and it began decades of work illustrating early humans directly from their fossilized remains and the places they were found. Matternes’ reputation was so unparalleled that in 1997 he was called to exclusively illustrate the early human Ardipithecus ramidus. “When I jumped at the chance, [paleoanthropologist Tim White] immediately swore me to secrecy, a security measure against academic piracy imposed on all of the 47 anthropologists, anatomists and geologists who joined the project,” Matternes says. He worked on the art for 12 years, studying the anatomy of a human that still had some potent hallmarks of earlier ape ancestry, until the art and scientific descriptions were published in 2009. Despite there not being funding for an artist in the grant budget, Matternes did this work for free. “I know it was a very important fossil related to human evolution, and I wanted to be the one to bring it back to life,” he says.

Collecting the art for the book was a task in itself. Matternes’ art is scattered across museums and publications. “More than a thousand pieces had to be gathered, organized, digitized,” Milner says, including childhood illustrations rediscovered in a wooden crate. It took two years before the pieces could be selected. The collection is the best of the best, which includes some material appearing in print for the first time—like an illustration of a three-million-year-old hippo-butchering site in prehistoric Kenya.

While Matternes can be self-effacing, describing his work as “just a job,” his art has opened windows to times and places no humans have ever visited, introduced millions to prehistoric life, and documented how interpretations of life through the ages have changed over time. Each piece is so lushly detailed that it is easy to get lost in the shaggy intricacies of a mammoth’s fur or the soft glow of reflected light on the underside of a kudu. Without Matternes, we would not see life the same way.

Budding and experienced artists alike can draw inspiration from Matternes’ skill and dedication. For those who wish to become professional wildlife artists themselves, Matternes says to “learn all you can about modern animals.” Knowing them inside and out, down to muscles and bones, is the basis for art. The anatomical basics will allow artists to restore long-extinct animals from the bones up, out to the tiny details of the living creature. Matternes also advises artists to retain copyright for their work, a business essential. But most important of all, he says, is to keep drawing every day. “Draw your parents,” Matternes says, “your furniture, your pets, everything you see. Draw! Draw! Draw!”