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the prehistoric world of neave parker
Neave Parker was an artist who made reconstructing the likenesses of dinosaurs and other extinct animals his speciality.
The Artist
Neave Parker was born in 1910. He wanted to be an artist, but that his father insisted that he take a safe job in a bank.
Parker lasted one week in the bank. Years later he recounted his experience:
“I was there for a week. Each day there was an error in the books and the whole staff had to stay behind until the error was found. It always ended with me. At the end of the week the manager invited me into his office and suggested, kindly but firmly, I should take up something else as a career. So I became a surveyor and later dropped this to go to art school".
By 1950, he was making animal illustrations for experts at the Natural History Museum, London. Amongst the experts was Dr Maurice Burton of the Museum’s department of Zoology. Burton wrote extensively on natural history matters of popular interest — mostly about animals— and Parker was his chosen artist. Over the years the two became friends.
Dr Burton introduced Neave Parker to his colleague Dr W.E. Swinton, the Museum’s dinosaur expert. Swinton commissioned Neave Parker to draw the dinosaur restorations for his books. Neave Parker’s superbly crafted dinosaur illustrations helped make Swinton’s books popular.
In 1989 the Ulster Museum bought seventeen of Parker’s original artworks for The Illustrated London News.
Triceratops
This animal lived 80 million years ago. We know that it existed, through the discovery of its fossilised bones in the rocks of North America. But how do we know what it looked like?
To begin with, scientists reassemble the fossil bones into a complete skeleton. This shows the size and shape of the animal. Next, an artist working closely with the scientists, and being briefed by them, draws what they believe the animal looked like. This requires of the artist both creativity and scientific knowledge. This is a rare combination.
Parker’s dinosaurs are not drawings of dead fossils, but depictions of living animals in their natural world. They featured in best-selling textbooks, museum guides and popular journals.
Canadian Dinosaurs
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The rocks of the interior of Canada are rich in dinosaur fossils. This is because they are the right age (Cretaceous Period, 135 to 66 million years ago), and the right kind of rock (sandstones that were originally laid down as layers of sand in rivers or lakes).
Dinosaurs were land-dwelling reptiles, and this scene shows the variety of dinosaurs alive 90 million years ago on the ancient surface of northern America. Today geologists search for their fossilised bones in the crumbling valleys of the Badlands of Alberta, which forms the modern land surface of this part of Canada.
Amongst the dinosaurs on view here are: in centre, middle — a pair of duck-billed dinosaurs, which walked on two legs, fed on vegetation and lived in or near water; and, on right behind the trees, a meat-eating dinosaur originally identified as Tyrannosaurus, now identified as Albertosaurus.
The ‘British’ seaside in the Jurassic
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Neave Parker attended many briefing sessions with Dr Swinton to compose this seaside vista set in the Jurassic Period of geological history, 208 to 146 million years ago.
The term ‘British’ in the title means that this is a scene based upon fossil finds from Jurassic rocks found in the present-day British Isles. However, the Jurassic Period greatly pre-dates the formation of the British Isles.
So many animals are shown in this drawing that it was reproduced as a double page spread in The Illustrated London News.
Here three species of dinosaurs are shown prowling on the coastal land surface, at top left. The dinosaur with the line of upright plates along its back is Stegosaurus, but it should not have been included in this scene, since its territory was limited to what is now North America. Swinton believed that a Stegosaurus plate had been found in Jurassic rocks near Peterborough, but it is now discounted.
In the sea at centre, Parker has depicted long-necked plesiosaurs and dolphin-shaped ichthyosaurs. They are often shown with dinosaurs and confused with them, but they were entirely separate groups of marine animals that were numerous in the Jurassic seas.
Parker also includes two flying creatures of the Jurassic Period: at right is the flying reptile Dimorphodon, whilst at bottom left is Archaeopteryx, the first fossil bird ever found, here gliding over fern-like Cycad trees. No Archaeopteryx fossils have actually been found in British rocks, but bird fossils are extremely rare and there is no reason to suppose that Archaeopteryx which lived at this time would not fit into this reconstruction of Jurassic life.
Chinese Dinosaurs
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The Illustrated London News, which began publication in May 1842, was the world’s first illustrated news magazine. Appearing on a weekly basis, it contained home and international news, crime stories, theatre reports, book reviews, court and society announcements and also accounts of contemporary developments in the arts, science and fashion. The articles were written for the interested, educated but non-specialist reader and they were accompanied by illustrations, the defining feature of the journal.
This is Neave Parker’s artwork for Dr Swinton’s report on recently discovered Chinese dinosaurs, which appeared in The Illustrated London News of 11 February 1956.
In the lake, centre, are two long-necked, plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs Omeisaurus. The two-legged, meat-eating theropod dinosaur Szechuanosaurus stalks in the right background. On the left, in middle distance are two plant-eating hadrosaur dinosaurs, unidentified by Swinton in 1956, now known as Tanius.
Dinosaur fossil discoveries are typically scattered bones and fragments, and it takes years for scientists to evaluate their finds and to decide if they have discovered new dinosaur species.
Elgin over 200 million years ago
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Around the town of Elgin, in Moray, in north-east Scotland there occur sandstone rocks, that date to over 200 million years ago. These sandstones contain an array of the fossilised bones and impressions of fishes and reptiles.
These sandstones are from the Permian and Triassic Periods of geological time, which is just before the appearance of the dinosaurs. The reptile fossils found in these Elgin sandstones are important clues to the evolution of the dinosaurs.
Based upon briefings from Swinton, Neave Parker drew this supposed ancient landscape, showing reconstructions of the reptiles, based upon their fossil remains found in the Elgin sandstones. It was to illustrate Swinton’s description of the ‘Elgin Reptiles’, that the drawing was carried in The Illustrated London News on 26 January 1957.
Yet this scene could never have existed in real life. The animals in the foreground are of the Permian Period, over 250 million years ago. Those on the rock outcrop are of Triassic age, many millions of years later.
The two-legged reptile on the top of the outcrop is Saltopus. This was thought to be the earliest dinosaur to be found in Scottish rocks. However, recent work has identified it as a dinosauriform — a forerunner of the dinosaurs.
The ‘Elgin Reptiles’ are a varied group and important to science.
Dinosaurs of the Gobi Desert
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In the 1950s, Soviet Union scientists organised expeditions to the Gobi Desert in central Asia to look for dinosaur remains. They found dinosaur bones, 80 million years old, that matched those found in North America of similar age. This suggested that Asia and America were not then separated by sea, as at present, and helps confirm the Theory of Continental Drift.
Neave Parker sketched this array of dinosaurs based upon the Gobi Desert finds, but as Dr Swinton made clear in his article, many of the dinosaurs shown here were equally at home in what we now know as the United States of America.
The large dinosaur seen on the right is Styracosaurus (its name means ‘spiked reptile'), while in the centre are two plant-eating duck-billed dinosaurs which are looking to the left with alarm at the predatory meat-eating Tarbosaurus, closely related to the better-known Tyrannosaurus.
The South African Karroo – Origins of Mammals
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Advised by Dr Swinton, Neave Parker drew this landscape of 200 million years ago. It is populated by a distinctive grouping of reptiles. The restoration of these reptiles is based upon fossils found in the Karroo region of southern Africa. These fossils are important in the geological record, because scientists believe they are the remains of mammal-looking reptiles that were evolving to true mammals.
The large beast on all fours at top left was the herbivore Kannemeyeria. Four other similarly-looking herbivores named Dicynodon are shown to the right. These herbivores measured three metres in length and a single one of them represented a substantial feast for the flesh-eating hunters Cynognathus, two of which are depicted at bottom left.
On the ground in the right foreground, is a pack of Tritylodon, the most advanced of the mammal-like reptiles. They show features of mammals in their skeletons and the insulating fur of their bodies implies warm-bloodedness and they probably bore their young alive, rather than laying eggs.
In the branches in the foreground are two opossums, using their tails to keep themselves secure. The opossums are modern mammals and Swinton requested Parker to include them in this composition to show the next step in evolution to true mammals.
The evolving of new life-forms occurs over millions and millions of years.
Living Fossils - Extinct Ancestors
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This drawing is the result of a collaboration between Neave Parker and Dr Maurice Burton, Deputy Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, London.
The term ‘living fossil’ was an invention of Charles Darwin, the originator of the concept of evolution, and it stuck. He used it to indicate a single species survivor of a major branch of evolution. Perhaps the most famous example is the coelacanth fish, found in 1938 when the entire group was supposed to have been extinct for 100 million years.
Burton provided Parker with the pithy annotations included on the drawing. Most remain valid, but the links between the trilobites and King Crabs and the Tuartara and the dinosaurs are much more tenuous than the rest.
It is interesting that a well-illustrated miscellany of scientific facts of this kind had such popular appeal for the readership of what was essentially an upper middle-class magazine.
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
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The dinosaurs dominated the world for 150 million years, until they died out at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 66 million years ago. It is believed that worldwide climate change was the major factor in their extinction.
Neave Parker drew this landscape to illustrate the variety of dinosaurs there were at the close of their era. Amongst the animals depicted are: on the right, two varieties of the four-legged ceratopsian dinosaurs; in the air pterosaurs — flying reptiles (these were not dinosaurs); at front around a fallen tree the first, primitive mammals; in centre two meat-eating dinosaurs; and behind these two, the duck-billed, plant-eating dinosaur Anatosaurus. The real, fossil skeleton of an Anatosaurus is on display on the ground floor of the Ulster Museum.
Neave Parker died on 5 May 1961. He was aged 51 years. In the following year, London’s Natural History Museum brought out a small handbook, titled ‘Dinosaurs’. It was to meet the demand from the Museum’s visitors “for more detailed information about these remarkable reptiles, whose remains form one of the most popular exhibits in the Museum”.
The handbook was illustrated with ten restorations of dinosaurs which Parker had previously made for a series of museum postcards. In the preface to the handbook, the Museum’s Keeper of Palaeontology wrote that the drawings were “from the skilled brush of Mr Neave Parker, whose recent death has robbed scientific journalism of one of its most outstanding artists”.