Distinctly Scottish Palaeoart: Borealestes Clan Crests

My colleagues and I recently published a new species of mammal from Jurassic Scotland, Borealestes cuillinensis. On the run up to publication I produced a palaeoart reconstruction using traditional methods (pencil, ink, paint), but when I saw the digital reconstructions by Matthew Humpage, I put mine aside in favour of his incredible work.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about my little beasties from Skye. Their evocative names, their discovery, and how these ancient beasts were wound into the rich cultural heritage of the Isle of Skye. Ruminating on all this, I ended up creating what I'm calling Borealestes Clan Crests. 

Borealestes Lucky Star, Clan Crest, by Elsa Panciroli

These palaeoart reconstructions were inspired in part by a mixture of Celtic and Pictish art and carving, and Scottish clan crests (e.g MacDonald, MacIntosh). Below, I’ll take you through the story behind each design. If you'd like a copy of the line-drawings of the images to colour-in (great activity for kids!) get in touch.

Borealestes of the Cuillin, Clan Crest, by Elsa Panciroli

The Borealestes Clan

The core of both images is a classic Celtic knot, seen in multiple sources. It forms a circle with a Pictish emblem at the top centre. The Picts were the people who lived in Scotland prior to the arrival of Gaelic-speaking peoples from Ireland, their culture having been merged into the Celtic and Norse that followed. The Pictish symbol is modelled on those found carved into stones on Skye, for example at Diurinish or Tote. It comprises a crescent with a V-rod through it, a symbol found elsewhere in Scotland as well.

Duirinish Pictish Stone (Source). Note the crescent and V-rod symbol at the top.

It’s not known what this symbol meant to the Picts – the meaning of Pictish carvings is lost to us. But it is thought that many Pictish symbols denoted particular tribes. I’ve used the idea here for the Borealestes ‘tribe’, or clan. I placed a Borealestes lower tooth at the apex of the V points, to show the shape of the lower molar, diagnostic for this genus. Within the crescent are two claw shapes pointing in opposite directions, traced from the actual fossil claw of B. cuillinensis (soon to be published), with a disc between them, symbolising the two species belonging to this genus.

The script around the top of the Celtic knot is based on Gaelic script, with some modifications. Gaelic script is a typeface used for printing Gaelic from the 16^th-18^th Century in Scotland (it survived a little later in Ireland). In the original script, a lower case ‘s’ resembled what in English is an ‘r’. This would have been confusing for modern readers, so I changed it to a smaller version of an upper case ‘S’.

Example of Gaelic Script (Source)

Borealestes serendipitus Crest

The dominant colour for this image is green, which matches the colour used in the paper for the figures of B. serendipitus. The name Borealestes means northern rogue (or brigand), so the dirk (a small Scottish dagger) pays tribute to this. It’s based on a specimen held at National Museums Scotland that came from the Highlands, and dates to the 18^th Century – truly, a time of rogues! The hilt of the original is wooden, but I’ve recreated it in horn.

An 18th Century dirk (small dagger) from the Scottish Highlands (NMS H.LC 63: source)

The wee bandit has the species name B. serendipitus, alluding to the serendipity of this lucky find (although it was not luck, Michael Waldman had done his research before seeking fossils there). To indicate this ‘luck’, I decided to incorporate a ‘lucky star’. I thought that seeing as this was the northern rogue, it’s lucky star would be Polaris, the northern star. It is the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor. 

Simplified constellations. Polaris is part of Ursa Minor, and can be found by orienting yourself using Ursa Major. (Source: Pintrest)

To honour the good luck of those who found this skeleton, I’ve depicted the constellations as they would have appeared looking directly north from Skye as darkness fell (at around 10pm) on the day the fossil was discovered (the 28^th of May, 1972, the fossil was collected the following year). I did this using a planisphere. The constellations depicted are, left to right: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor (with Polaris the ‘lucky star’), Draco above it, Cepheus, and finally Cygnus.

Behind the constellations, an aurora borealis glows green, signifying again that this is the northern rogue. It is an additional symbol of luck, because you need to be kind of lucky to see this phenomenon!

Borealestes cuillinensis Crest

The dominant colour for this image is blue, which matches the colour used in the paper for the figures of B. cuillinensis. This crest is simpler than the other, and focuses on the species name. The animal is named for the Cuillin, a mountain range on Skye famous for their beauty. These are the peaks in dark blue below this image. I traced the outline of their iconic ridge from my own photographs, taken during fieldwork. The sun is just setting behind them, creating a warm glow on the Western horizon.

Me enjoying the sunset, with the Cuillin mountains behind, above Loch Scavaig. (Photo: my own)

On Finding a Dinosaur

They tell me I’m good at finding things. Word searches, jigsaw puzzles - they are unintentional brain-training to isolate patterns in chaos. When looking for fossils it takes a few attempts to recognise what you’re seeking. Then they say you ‘get your eye in’, or that you ‘have the eye’ for it. I tell them, I have two.

I found my first dinosaur on a glorious sunny day in the Inner Hebrides. I leapt from boulder to boulder across the foreshore of the Isle of Eigg, sprinting like a mountain goat back to my teammates. With each jump I looked down to place my feet securely on dry Jurassic sandstone, which Velcro-gripped the soles of my tattered hiking boots. The stench of sulphur was making me dizzy – a nearby pool choked in marine algae was festering in the hot May sunshine. To avoid it, I moved up shore. As I flew down from a high platform into a small shingle inlet, I saw a silhouette. Long, with a bulbous end. Pattern recognition. 

Shoreline on Isle of Eigg, with Isle of Rum in the distance.

Momentum carried me several steps further along the clattering shingle before I fully registered what I’d seen. I skidded and turned back. The shape was nestled in a boulder tucked below the sandstone outcrops. I crouched down and reached out, running my fingertips across the rough surface. The electric-thrill formed a Bifröst to the ancient past.

Most fossils are not worth collecting, and that’s where scientific knowledge comes in. It was my fourth palaeontological expedition with teams working in my home-country of Scotland. That day in 2017 I recognised the black splodge on the rocks of the foreshore as the remains of a limb bone. It looked like burnt charcoal, the surface cracked as though oven-baked. Where the bone was damaged I saw the tell-tale honeycomb of a structure once-living; the strut of biological architecture, nature’s engineering exposed. A portion of the long mid-shaft was gone, leaving a ghostly indent in the rock. A million frozen grains of sand encased one end of the bone, reluctant to let it go. This stone had carried it for 166 million years like a time-capsule. It was a dinosaur limb bone. I took photographs, then turned and sped South again. 

The Eigg dinosaur bone, or StEiggosaurus, moments after I found it.

When I found my team mates I told them I’d found something. What is it? they asked. I knew how disappointing it was when your ‘fossil’ find turned out to be a bit of driftwood, or a splatter of solidified tar, so I replied that I wasn’t sure, but maybe a limb bone... What kind of limb bone? They pressed. I sheepishly mentioned some possibilities, non-commitally mumbling dinosaur.

I led them back along the shore. When they caught up and saw it, their faces exploded like grin-grenades. They knelt and examined it, agreeing it was indeed a dinosaur limb bone. The first dinosaur I’d found, and the first dinosaur ever found on the Isle of Eigg.

We took photographs and notes, planning how it could be collected. In the following weeks a team arrived by boat to slice through the shore and cut out its dinosaur heart. This bone - which had drifted offshore in the Jurassic sea and come to rest in a sandy bed for a geological nap - now drifted once again, southwards to the lab of our colleague, Nigel Larkin. He carefully removed the surrounding sandstone, exposing the limb bone for us to study.

My artwork showing the kind of dinosaur the Eigg bone belonged to. It may have died crossed a river or delta, and been washed out to sea.

It was scarred by scavengers, and the ceaseless surf of Eigg had made off more than half the evidence, one granule at a time. To figure out to which animal it belonged, I worked with palaeontologists who specialise in different groups of extinct reptile: Femke Holwerda (sauropod-lover), Susannah Maidment (queen of stegosaurs), Davide Foffa (marine reptile chaser), Stephen Brusatte (theropod enthuser). With so little of the bone left to study, we turned to the tell-tale biological structure for further clues. Gregory Funston examined the microscopic structure of the bone, a codex for an animal’s growth. The evidence combined to tell us that this was the leg bone of a stegosaurian dinosaur, a plate-backed herbivore of the Jurassic. An early resident of Eigg, now at rest in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

By the time the whole team had assembled to look at the discovery on the shoreline that Summer’s day, I was already elsewhere. I’m restless as a wave, prefering movement. Hopefully life will always find me leaping along fermenting shorelines and shuffling below cliffs. I revel in zenful hours squinting at glinting surfaces, with salt spray scratching my lips and flaying my fingertips, sifting through ancient sands for fragments of Jurassic Scotland. 

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Panciroli, E., Funston, G. F., Holwerda, F., Maidment, S. C. R., Foffa, D., Larkin, N., Challands, T., dePolo, P., Goldberg, D., Humpage, M., Ross, D., Wilkinson, M., Brusatte, S. L. 2020. First dinosaur from the Isle of Eigg (Valtos Sandstone Formation, Middle Jurassic), Scotland. Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1-16.

Reconstructing Wareolestes

I recently blogged about the paper I published with colleagues on a little lower jaw from the Isle of Skye, belonging to a Middle Jurassic mammaliaform called Wareolestes rex. Like many people, I believe palaeoart is a vitally important part of palaeontology, particularly as it forms a quick visual bridge between palaeontologists and the public (and other scientists!) So I'd like to share the palaeoart reconstruction I did for Wareolestes, and talk about the science behind it, and the informed speculations.

My reconstrction of Wareolestes rex. The only bit we have is the jaw, so much of the rest is informed speculation - informed by scientific evidence and living relatives. It was done in pencil and watercolour.

Mesozoic mammal art is often not especially inspiring. This is partly because, until recently, most Mesozoic mammal fossil material comprised mostly teeth, which doesn't make for exciting reconstruction. As a result, artists often choose to have their early mammals snarling to show off their teeth - the only certain part of the art! Also, there is a strange notion that small mammals are boring; but a quick google search will soon show you that they come in a huge range of sizes, shapes, colours and behaviours: inspiration for great art. However, palaeoartists have shied away from speculating about fur, whiskers, ears and eyes, erring on the side of caution and producing identikit snarling, splayed mice.

I wanted to try and do a reconstruction in an informed, but moderately speculative way. So I started work on reconstructing Wareolestes while I was still writing the paper, hoping to make informed scientific decisions based on the fossil record, and then spice it up by examining the appearance of small modern mammals.

There is a bit of a tradition among Mesozoic mammal workers of comparing our fossil beasties to the modern American opossum (Didelphis). I therefore decided to use them as the inspiration for the reconstruction. Google 'opossum', and you'll find this animal has a penchant for bearing its teeth. While I shy away from those snarling Mesozoic mammals on the whole, our Wareolestes fossil is a lower jaw with teeth, so this open-mouthed expression was fitting in this instance. Forgive me for breaking my own rules; in future reconstructions of fossils (especially those with known postcranial skeletons) I'll avoid teeth-bearing if I can help it.

The opposum Didelphis is a wonderfully charismatic creature, and often photographed bearing its teeth - handy if your fossil is a jaw with teeth and nothing else.

Our digital reconstructions (from microCT scans) were the base for drawing the mouth and teeth. As not all of the teeth were present in the Scottish fossil, I modelled the other premolars, canines, and incisors on two closely related genera: Dinnetherium and Megazostrodon. On reflection, I think the front of the snout should have been a little longer... but at this point we don't know for sure. I based the rest of the skull on Morganucodon, as Wareolestes is a morganucodontid. However, I made it more robust, because Wareolestes was larger and chunkier than it's geologically older relative.

Amazing skull and muscle reconstruction of Morganucodon by Lautenschlager et al 2016

So far, so good. But from here on, things get more speculative. We don't have much in the way of preserved fur or skin, except for a few exceptional specimens from China (but not of this genus). Undoubtedly Wareolestes and other Mesozoic mammals had fur, inherited from their non-mammal ancestors. They almost certainly had whiskers: we know this thanks to evidence in the fossil record for innervation in the snout. Whiskers probably developed in earlier non-mammalian cynodonts, which would have used them to sense their way through burrows. Therefore, whiskers are very likely to have existed in the earliest insectivorous, nocturnal mammals, being used to sense their environment and hunt for food.

I chose the shrew and the Solenodon (see below) as inspiration for the whiskers. Their whiskers extend quite far up the face, and point in multiple directions.

Beautiful shrew, showing off those sensitive whiskers. (By David Chapman, from the Cornwall Mammal Group)

The nose and ears of Mesozoic mammals, being entirely composed of soft tissue, are also impossible to reconstruct without speculation. Mesozoic mammals had well-developed olfactory bulbs, so they had a good sense of smell. I went for an opossum-like nose, simply because I liked the look of it.

This sleeping opposum's nose might be the cutest thing EVER. Will the squeeing ever stop? (I got this off pintrest, contact me if you can ID the source)

At this point in their evolution, mammals still had their post-dentary bones attached to the inside of the jaw. These bones would later reduce and detach, becoming incorporated into the middle ear. This allowed mammals to develop exquisite hearing, especially at higher frequencies. So what did they hear when the bones were still attached to the jaw? The answer is: we don't know. The postdentary bones were certainly used in hearing though. I decided a small proto-ear was fitting, based on a slightly crumpled version of a Solenodon ear. I kept them simple, small, and placed low on the head.

Close up of a Hispaniolan Solenodon (Source)

The Solenodon is a small, nocturnal insectivorous mammal found on some Caribbean Islands. It is weird on so many levels, not just because it has venomous saliva, but also as it is the only genus surviving in its family, the Solenodontidae. Phylogeneticists trace their origins back to the Cretaceous, making this an altogether unique animal and a good analogue to find inspiration for the life appearance of Mesozoic mammals. Because of this, I chose the dark back and upper face of the Solenodon as inspiration for the colour pattern on Wareolestes. However, I then decided to add a little cheek and eye patterning.

Finally, the eyes. It's hard to say how large the eye would have been relative to the head. I decided to go for something I know and love: the eye of a rat. This is a total bias on my part, because as a many-time rat-owner, I was always delighted by those dark chocolate beady eyes greeting me each morning, staring with demented twitchiness and tiny black pupils pointing in opposite directions. Mental. However it does leave me open to all the "aren't Mesozoic mammals just a bunch of rats anyway?" comments people just can't restrain themselves from making... sigh*.

So there you have it. This was my process in creating a Wareolestes rex reconstruction. I played it kind of safe - I could have speculated about the rest of the body, but decided it was a step too far. This is my first proper go at palaeoart, so theres still a lot to learn. Hopefully in the coming field seasons we'll find more of the skeleton and I'll be able to revise the image based on more evidence. In the meantime, I'd love to hear you opinions, ideas, and comments - get in touch on twitter: @gsciencelady

*Wareolestes is of course not a rodent, as rodents didn't evolve for another 100 million years. The resemblence is superficial, anatomically they are totally different.


References
 
Benoit J., Manger P. and Rubidge BS. 2016 Palaeoneurological clues to the evolution of defining mammalian soft tissue traits. Scientific Reports.

Lautenschlager S., Gill P, Luo Z-X., Fagan MJ., and Rayfield EJ. 2016 Morphological evolution of the mammalian jaw adductor complex. Biological Reviews.

Panciroli E., Benson RBJ., and Walsh S. 2017 The dentary of Wareolestes rex (Megazostrodontidae): a new specimen from Scotland and implications for morganucodontan tooth replacement. doi: 10.1002/spp2.1079