Almost five years ago to the day, Neil Shubin’s first book (and my first foray into illustrating popular non-fiction), Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body debuted. It was by all accounts hugely successful, far exceeding the publisher’s sales expectations in the first few months and going into multiple [...]

When a big fossil discovery is announced, the initial imagery that floods the news outlets is carefully controlled by the lab responsible for the discovery. That is usually followed by a period of rougher, often inaccurate attempts to reconstruct the animal by aspiring illustrators or adoring geeky fans around the globe. But then an amazing [...]

Tyler Keillor (pronounced “KEEL-er”) is a soft-spoken, understated paleoartist whose work is anything but. He works at the University of Chicago as a paleoartist, reconstructing creatures that paleontologist Paul Sereno excavates on his expeditions around the world. When I met Tyler eleven years ago, he was working in a cavernous, three-story high cinderblock warehouse, with [...]