The science behind the sketch

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 23rd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: bringing fossils to life.

What can ancient bones, shells, and scraps of soft tissue really tell us?

In the hands of skilled scientists and artists, they can reveal ancient stories.

BROWN: WORLD’s Mary Muncy takes us to the rugged Badlands of South Dakota, where turning fossils into full illustrations is part science, part sleuthing, and part imagination.

MARY MUNCY: At Badlands National Park in South Dakota, there’s a big blue mural on the wall of the Visitor Center with a creature that looks kind of like a sea monster.

AUTUMN CARLSON: What is that?

HEATHER CARLSON: It's called a mosasaur.

Autumn Carlson and her mom are walking through the park’s fossil exhibit.

AUTUMN: What is this?

HEATHER: That's its jaw.

There are illustrations and replicas of what scientists think ancient animals might have looked like all over the Visitor Center but not everyone agrees on those interpretations and trying to figure it out is a long process without much confirmation.

While Autumn peppers her mom with questions about the fossils they’re seeing, paleontologists are in the back, trying to uncover more buried creatures.

MARY CARPENTER: I've got a pond turtle.

Mary Carpenter is a paleontologist. She’s holding a turtle shell encased in rock.

CARPENTER: I've been working on this, trying to expose the bottom side, especially. The top of the turtle shell was relatively exposed.

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She looks through a microscope and uses a tool with a needle on the end to chip away at the rock.

The work is very slow—there’s just a few inches of the shell exposed—and Carpenter is only removing dust-size pieces.

CARPENTER: Every time we chip that rock away, it's the first time that this animal gets to see the sunlight again.

Exposing the fossil is one of the first steps in figuring out what the creature used to look like.

If it’s something less well-known than a turtle, paleontologists will study the bones and compare them to similar finds. They’ll record their findings and make educated guesses about what an animal might have looked like then it’s the illustrators’ turn.

JOEL LEINEWEBER: Today I'm working on a drawing of an animal called Codypterics.

Joel Leineweber is the Vice President of Design at Answers in Genesis.

He’s moving an evolutionist-made model of a fossil around on his computer.

LEINEWEBER: Some scientists say this animal was a dinosaur and other scientists say that this animal was a bird.

And some say it’s a link between them because they found fossilized feather impressions. Right now, the illustration on Joel’s screen is standing upright with its arms hanging down to the side and its tail straight out. It looks like a raptor. But Leineweber says he doesn’t think that’s quite right.

LEINEWEBER: For one, the tail is really short. It's, I think it's less than 20 tail vertebrae. And dinosaurs, we expect to find 30 or more tail vertebrae. And that pattern is really consistent across these animals.

Another reason is that birds today have special wrists and shoulders that allow them to tuck their wings up and to fly and this fossil has both.

So, Leineweber starts making adjustments to the skeleton.

LEINEWEBER: Now, I've got the knees a little more crouched, I've got the wing a little more folded, and you can see the, you know, the next little marker, the tail’s a little bit more curved.

Now, it looks a lot more like a chicken.

Before he started posing and drawing it, Leineweber and a team of scientists spent years researching what the paleontologists found.

LEINEWEBER: How big would the beak be? What color were the feathers? How long were the feathers? All of those types of things.

He sends the pose over to his iPad and starts drawing feathers around the head and neck

LEINEWEBER: So I'm kind of drawing around the legs now. Codypterics had pretty long legs, and so some scientists think that he was a quick runner.

He adds some dark greys and browns, and a few white highlights to the feathers.

LEINEWEBER: There are some microscopic molecules, color molecules, that are sometimes found in the fossil record, but not very often, and these, this coloration in this drawing is kind of based on those.

Some scientists think there must have been more colors than what we find in the fossil record, because there isn’t much variation. Plus, the molecules themselves underwent a lot of pressure when they were buried and the bones fossilized, and that could have changed their structure.

So, just like the pose, the colors are left up to at least some interpretation. All of it combined can result in some vastly different results based on worldview.

Leineweber adds a couple of finishing touches to the sketch and saves the file… He talked to me again from his office.

LEINEWEBER: A creationist will look at that evidence and say, ‘Oh, look, look at that. It's clearly a bird.’ But an evolutionist will look at that and say, ‘Oh, well, it has some of these characteristics so, and it was in this rock layer, so it must be a transitional form between this animal and this animal, and they come to a different conclusion.

He started drawing dinosaurs as a kid. Now, he’s drawing them for other kids like Autumn at the visitor center, who have big questions about their world. He hopes his work will give them a more accurate understanding of the world before them and help them understand the world around them now.

LEINEWEBER: When I create artwork, I can draw attention to the fact that God's word is trustworthy. When you can trust the history in the Bible, then you can trust that what Jesus did on the cross and the history that that's rooted in is trustworthy as well.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy in Badlands, South Dakota.

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