I think a strong case could be made that the watercolour painting above is one of the most important pieces of artwork in history.
It lacks the grandeur of a Michelangelo fresco or the detail of a Monet. In fact, judged on artistic merit alone, the Duria Antiquior is almost unworthy of note, drowned out by the sheer volume of 19th century masterpieces.
But the Duria Antiquior is more important than the sum of its parts. Painted by the famous geologist Henry De La Beche, and inspired by the findings of his childhood friend and fossil hunter Mary Annings, who was busy discovering plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs along the white cliffs of the Jurassic Coast, the Duria Antiquior is a first of its kind.
It is the the first artistic rendering of prehistoric life based on evidence from fossil reconstructions. Or put another way, it is the first piece of artwork attempting to accurately display the lives and appearances of long extinct lifeforms.
On the face of it, it’s not immediately apparent why this should be so significant. Yes, it’s quite a nice picture of some long-dead sea monsters and the weird trees in the background are sort of quirky. But placed in a historical context, the true importance of the painting becomes clear.
You see, although extinction might be an obvious fact of life to us nowadays–what with our museums stocked with dinosaur bones and our explorers not being savaged by sabre-toothed tigers or trampled by woolly mammoths–it wasn’t always so.
President Thomas Jefferson famously thought that elephant-like mastadons were still roaming alive in the unexplored West in North America. Indeed, many people in the past believed that fossils originated from the creatures still surviving elsewhere on the planet in relic populations.
Other ideas for the origins of fossils ranged from them being the remains of mythical creatures, like giants, unicorns and dragons, to the strange suggestions that they arose spontaneously as simple forms from the earth itself.
All this is to say that we’ve known the truth (that fossils are the remains of lifeforms that have gone extinct) for only an astonishingly short stint of time. We now know that 99.9% of all life that has ever existed on Earth has gone extinct. Much of it was wiped out during a series of mass extinction events, the most recent of which decimated the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.
Fast-forward less than 200 years from the first ever artistic depiction of long-extinct creatures and the story thickens. In that drop in the ocean of geological time, humans have fundamentally reshaped the planet. in the last forty years alone we’ve lost more than half of Earth’s wildlife. Having only just learnt about the process of extinction, we’ve speedily become the leading driver of it.
From climate change to deforestation to poaching, human activities are causing a plummet in biodiversity the likes of which is unmatched since that awful affair with an oversized asteroid sixty-five million years ago.
That’s why I think the Duria Antiquior is so important.
It reminds us of how quickly we’ve gone from understanding and communicating ideas of extinction to spawning it on a massive scale. But most importantly of all, it reminds us that we cannot wait another two hundred years to prevent it.
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