









It is not very often I have been asked to get into restoring marine life evolution… but my friend Marco Signore asked me to do this mammoth task. I started with a mural on whale evolution where I tried to make whale ancestors look as “sexy” as I would try to do my dinosaurs. Don’t know how successfully, but I think I managed somehow! I got some criticism about Basiliosaurus looking too much like T. rex…with that killer smile!
But then came the uber-test. Marco had this idea about a mural occupying ten meters of a corridor, where you would start in the Cenozoic and run back in time into the Ediacaran fauna… Well it was supposed to be >one< mural… but a corridor has two sides, so… If you want to be immersed in it both sides, it resulted in TWO murals, one facing the other. We had a list of a number of animals and I decided to repeat some but alternate others in different takes. A challenge was to make believable such array of sizes… from close-ups of almost microscopic Burgess Shale denizens to humongous Leedsichthys and Basilosaurus… or a small whale-eater like Megalodon!
Many months later we have the results. And despite many troubles. dealing with painfully detailed, slow motion hi-res gigantic computer files, here it is for your perusal at Naples’ newly opened Darwin Dohrn Museum of Marine Life … In fact, I’m posting this precisely the day the Museum opens!
It is meant, more than anything else, to be a colourful celebration of Marine Evolution, with a few selected protagonists. And we have done it… no dinosaurs this time, but hey, vive la difference!

This is lovely work you’ve cited; a hearty thank you to yourself for this.
Reblogged this on Palpatine's Literary Library and commented:
Lovely work he’s got here.