Tag: Smithsonian

DC part 4 – Dinosaurs and Co

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T-Rex v Triceratops

I walked across Capitol Mall towards the hotel, and stopped into the National Museum of Natural History, which still had about an hour and a half before closing time. I love that it’s free to enter the Smithsonian. If it wasn’t for my sketchbook I could have still seen a lot more of that museum, but I wanted to draw dinosaurs. Or rather, Dinosaurs And Other Prehistoric Creatures. The dinosaur displays at the Smithsonian are pretty great, and I did see as many as I could in such a short time, but I really wanted to draw the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex biting into the frill of a stricken Triceratops. It was a real frill-seeker. The museum was quite busy, and this was a popular display. Poor Triceratops though.

DC-MNH-Allosaurus

Nearby was this ashen-boned skull of an Allosaurus, another of my favourite dinosaurs when I was a kid. As with so many things, my all-time top-five dinosaur (and other prehistoric creatures) list was established when I was about five or six from the two very important dinosaur books I owned (one of which I still have, ‘Dinosaurs Discovered’ by John Gilbert), and specifically from the Guy Michel artwork inside. This was back when dinosaurs stood upright like people or kangaroos, letting their tails trail on the floor behind them, the good old days. One of those favourites was the Allosaurus, which I think I liked more than the T-Rex because it had three fingers instead of two on each arm. A bit like Mourinho holding up three fingers to show how many Premier Leagues he has won. I still remember being a young dinosaur lover, going to the Natural History Museum with my big sister, and still have my original pronunciations of prehistoric words in my head, like the ‘cretackus’ period, or the ‘velo-kee-raptor’, or the great feathered ‘archie-oper-terrix’. I wouldn’t say those now, but Diplodocus is and always will be ‘diplo-DOcus’, not ‘di-PLOD-uckus’, none of that nonsense. Allosaurus is easy enough to pronounce, although this one being ‘Fragilis’ reminded me of A Christmas Story, the box marked ‘fra-gile’ which must have been Italian.

Dimetrodon

One creature whose name I’ve grudgingly accepted isn’t pronounced my way is Dimetrodon (more ‘di-MET-rodon’ and not ‘DYMER-TRODON’, whatever).I say creature because this one is not actually a dinosaur, coming from a much earlier time period, the early Permian period (the Cisuralian epoch of that period if we are being precise, and there was no way five year old Pete was pronouncing Cisuralian without bursting into laughter, even forty-nine year old Pete thinks it’s funny). This one was on my top five list for sure, because I had a plastic toy of it and it had that cool sail on it’s back. Did you ever have those old plastic toy dinosaurs? I don’t mean like flimsy easy to break ones, no these ones were completely indestructible. In the early 1980s when we were all having nightmares about nuclear war (we still get those, don’t we fellow Gen-X-ers!) I knew for a fact that the only things that would survive a nuclear bomb were cockroaches and my toy dinosaurs. Even though this is not a dinosaur, as far as I am concerned it is part of the club. It’s like John Hagen, he was part of the Corleone family, but they would always remind him he was German-Irish and not really Sicilian. I had never seen a Dimetrodon skeleton in the, er, flesh, so I had to sketch this beauty. You would not mess with this. I’d like to see fight between a Saltwater Crocodile and a Dimetrodon, or Luca Brasi and a Dimetrodon. Things were better in the old Permian period though weren’t they, not like now. There weren’t all these ‘continents’ that you have nowadays, it was just one continent, Pangaea, and one ocean, Panthalassa. It was just better wasn’t it. If you were a Dimetrodon back in the old Cisuralian epoch, you could walk from Gondwana to Laurasia and not get hassled by ice ages. Then all the continents started breaking up, egos got involved, the dinosaurs came along, the Atlantic Ocean started filling up, and now there’s all this.

Uintatherium Anceps

Before the museum’s closing time, which as coming at me like a steam train, I decided to fast forward several hundred million years to the Time of Mammals. The continents were not quite where they are now but they were well on the way, I think India was still sailing through it’s Ocean, leaving Antarctica very much out in the cold, and England had just started counting it’s ‘years of hurt’ since winning the World Cup. This is the Uintatherium Anceps (I’m not even going to try to pronounce that, I couldn’t even spell it while writing the word down from a sign), which was an early ungulate relative from Wyoming, you’ve all had those relatives. I think it was a bit like a massive rhino, but with big tusks like a Smilodon. Elongated Tusks were still quite fashionable back then, before everyone realized how weird they were. This skull is an amazing shape though, you wouldn’t want to tread on a plastic toy of this, never mind Lego blocks.

And then the people came around to tell me that the museum was closing, and the last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the museum. I’ve seen those films, they are very scary. I walked back out onto Capitol Mall with a book full of new sketches, and then decided to go and do some more. See you in DC Part 5.

DC part 3 – Day at the Smithsonian

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Planes at the Smithsonian

I was super excited to finally visit the Smithsonian, one of the greatest (maybe the greatest?) collection of museums in the world, all free entry, an absolute gift to the world. I obviously go to these places now with filling a sketchbook in mind, but I’m actually just super interested in all the history on display, and eager to see it all. When I was a kid, I remember my mum’s friend Terri went to America and visited the Smithsonian, bringing me back a pen from the National Air and Space Museum, one of those special pens that astronauts use that can write upside down. I imagined astronauts up there writing postcards, or drawing. I was delighted to see the gift shop still selling these gimmicky pens, but I treasured the one I had when I was a kid and would show it off at primary school. Of course I would just write the words upside down, wondering why astronauts needed to write upside down words, possibly to confuse any hostile alien life forms they encountered, or maybe like when you see ambulances display the word ‘ambulance’ backwards so motorists can read it in their wing mirrors. It’s all part of astronaut training I suppose. Now I like to draw airplanes (I say aeroplanes) even though they are a bit difficult, they are fascinating. The wings are always a lot longer than you expect. You really need those double-page panoramic spreads in the old Moleskine. Above, a whole selection of planes drawn from the second floor. There was a large section of the Museum that was not open to the public, unfortunately, which according to the man included the plane called ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ (I am glad I never asked about that plane, because as established in a previous post I would definitely pronounce it wrong). Still, I wasn’t disappointed. We spent a lot of time doing the slow museum-walking around checking it all out, until we needed an overpriced snack, after which the family left while I stayed to sketch.

The Apollo 11 capsule!!!!

Now this here above is one of history’s greatest bits of technology. I draw a lot of stuff, fire hydrants, trees, but once in a while I get to draw an actual piece of significant human history. this is the Apollo 11 Command Module, Columbia, the actual thing that the other fellow sat in while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear (sorry, Aldrin) gallivanted about on the surface of the Moon. They were faffing about making small steps and playing golf or whatever, while up in space the other fellow, Michael Collins (not that one, Irish history fans) had to stay in the car. A bit like when you’re a kid and you have to wait in the car while your dad and your uncle go to the pub. It’s amazing to look at it and think that is the actual module, the real thing that went to space, that we all learned about at school (except in conspiracy-theory states). I’m standing there just inches from history, and it’s a tiny tin can. Definitely had to draw this. I also had to draw some of the space suits on display, see below. Imagine having to wear that. Being an astronaut is no walk in the park. I remember seeing this really realistic film when I was a kid called SpaceCamp which taught me exactly what real astronaut training must be like, and that ended my dream of being a space traveller.

Space-suits

Speaking of space, there was another piece of history on display, a life-size actual X-Wing fighter, suspended high above the seats next to the bathroom. I sat and drew that, of course I did. It was a T-70 model, which as you know is from the Resistance era, the sort Poe Dameron would fly, not Luke Skywalker. Strange that it had a little model of R2-D2 in it and not BB-8. I prefer the Rebellion era X-Wings, because their engines don’t split in half for some reason when they lock S-foils into attack position. What do I know. The X-Wing is like the Spitfire of Star Wars. Or maybe it’s like the F-16, I love an F-16, and the Naboo Starfighter is like the Spitfire. Oh I don’t know, it’s a pretend spaceship.

X-Wing (Resistance era)

Still we came a long long way from what came first, which was the original Wright Brothers flyer, from 1903, as flown on that fateful day at Kitty Hawk. Here it is below, the real actual one. It reminded me a little of the Ewok gliders, but as you know the Ewoks could only glide from the trees, they were not technologically advanced enough to achieve take-off. This though is another piece of real actual history. Sure, we would have figured it out in the end, but from the moment humans learned to fly, figuring out how to both take off and land, well that was it. Game over. Of course Wilbur/Orville (below, the one who looks like the conductor from the Polar Express) was obviously lying in it backwards as we all now know, but back then they just didn’t know any better. It still looks more comfortable than flying Virgin Atlantic economy.

DC-NASM 1908 Wright Flyer

The day was moving away from me fast, and I can only draw so much in such a short period of time. I spent a lot of time looking at racecars, but it was time to go and draw dinosaurs…