What happened on Earth after the dinosaurs died?
Humans could learn a thing or two from the tiny creatures that survived and evolved after an asteroid wiped out most of the life on Earth more than 66 million years ago, said Ken Angielczak, a paleobiologist at the Field Museum.
That 15-million-year period of time post-extinction, before humans, has remained a relatively mysterious era for scientists. Not all life forms on Earth were killed off. Many of the plants and animals we know today evolved from various birds, mammals, reptiles and vegetation that lived during the aftermath of the impact.
And without predators like dinosaurs around, a lot of those animals grew — and grew to be gigantic.
From enormous mammals like the plant-eating coryphodon to penguins that stood as tall as six feet, the now-extinct creatures that roamed the Earth come back to life in a new exhibition called “After the Age of Dinosaurs.” The Field commissioned several artists, including Chicago screenprinter Jay Ryan, to imagine what they might have looked like.
“I appreciate that they hired a local person to work on this,” Ryan, who owns a printshop in Skokie called The Bird Machine, said. This is the largest project he’s ever worked on.
Ryan is well-known in music circles for designing poster art, illustrated books and even album covers for Flaming Lips and Andrew Bird. But none of those projects was as “complex” as this one, he said.
“Lots of people know about dinosaurs,” said co-curator of the exhibit, Ken Angielcyzk. Movies like “Ice Age” introduced animals like the woolly mammoth and giant ground sloth to wider audiences.
“They’re relatively recent things, and they’re sort of familiar animals,” he continued. “But there’s lots of parts of the fossil record that people just aren’t very familiar with, because even though scientists study them a lot, it’s not something that gets a lot of media attention.”
About 100 prehistoric specimens from a 15-million-year period in time are included in the new exhibition, which comprises many never-before-seen fossils like the mousebird. It was found in Wyoming, but its closest living relative is found throughout Southern Africa, according to Marie Georg, the museum’s exhibition developer.
Like the mousebird, some of the fossils don’t even have a scientific name yet.
Those new fossils include branches from a tree belonging to the chocolate group, and large leaves of the elephant plant, which both grew in the humid climate of the time.
The exhibit also features interactive displays and around 60 scientifically accurate pieces of artwork made by Ryan. Six large illustrated murals or panels made by Ryan can be found at the start of and throughout the exhibit.
“Normally, I’m pretty fast and loose with my anatomical accuracy,” he said. He’s known for his fun, cartoonish squirrel posters and depictions of raccoons on bicycles.
The Field Museum helped Ryan “find that balance between getting it right as far as scientific accuracy” while allowing for his distinct style.
Museum staffers provided him with information about each animal, including decades-old renderings made by scientists. Georg and “After the Age of Dinosaurs” co-curator Angielcyzk provided Ryan with guidance about how a particular mammal’s teeth might’ve been angled or how long a femur bone should be, he said.
Ryan’s illustrations are some of the most accurate depictions of what these prehistoric beings would’ve looked like.
“It was a big challenge for me, and I was happy with the way things turned out, but it was a more involved process, with more people offering professional opinions than I’m used to doing in my day-to-day work.”
One of Ryan’s favorite illustrations is of the titanoboa, which was the longest snake to ever live. It was 45 feet in length, and the model, on the walls of the museum, is to scale.
For the museum, working with an illustrator like Ryan for the exhibition helped achieve the goal of giving the presentation “a really fun feel,” Georg said.
Angielczyk said that most of the specimens on display are from the Field Museum’s collection. They’ve just never been revealed to the public in this way.
And though the specimens are from a period well before human life, they have many lessons to teach us today.
As the temperature on Earth gradually heats up due to climate change, scientists hope these discoveries can guide the future.
“The scale of human impacts on the environment, things like habitat destruction and global warming and stuff like that, really are reaching a point where their scale is unprecedented in human history,” Angielczyk said.
“Mass extinctions and their subsequent recoveries that we see in the fossil record are actually very important for thinking about what’s going on in the world around us today,” he added.
The large first-floor exhibit opens by replicating the silence, darkness and destruction that came after the asteroid’s impact.
What follows are glimpses of Earth’s first tropical rainforests and the various flowering plants. Visitors can see and feel 3D-printed models of teeth from the early ancestors of various hooved animals and hear the sounds those ancient creatures might’ve made. Several of the fossils have been replicated so people can touch them and compare their sizes to modern animals.
“And then with time, [the exhibit] builds up again until you get to this point in time that you’ve got a rich ecosystem, as if you were in the Amazon today,” Georg said. “You’d hear life all around you.”
