Where Art and Science Meet Artist Peter Trusler and
paleontologists Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas H. Rich
collaborate to bring long-extinct species to life on the page
Australian artist Peter Trusler has a talent for portraying
long-extinct creatures and the landscapes in which they lived in
ways consistent with the best scientific evidence. His
engrossing illustrations have appeared in books, scientific
exhibitions, popular publications, even on Australian postage
stamps. For more than 30 years Trusler also has collaborated
with Patricia Vickers-Rich, professor of paleontology and
founding director of the Monash Science Centre at Monash
University, and her husband, Thomas H. Rich, senior curator of
vertebrate paleontology at Museum Victoria. In the The Artist
and the Scientists: Bringing Prehistory to Life (Cambridge
University Press, 2010)—excerpted below—Trusler, Vickers-Rich
and Rich explore the fertile opportunities for provocation, when
established ideas are challenged, and for education when meticul