In a brightly lit production studio at the American Museum of Natural History in February, 12 artists were hard at work, heads down, eyes focused.
In one corner, a sculptor was shaping clay to create a cat-size flying reptile, a rhamphorhynchus, using a tracing of the animal's footprints that had been captured in a stone trackway excavated in Utah. In a back room, in hazmat suits and respirators, a team of three was building another kind of a pterosaur, as the flying reptiles are known: a nine-foot-long tropeognathus from foam, fiberglass and epoxy around an aluminum frame.
But in the center of it all was the big daddy - the 28-foot-long quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan as wide as a fighter jet and a crested head the size of a canoe. As the star of the museum's latest show, 'Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs' opening on April 5, he has had four artists assigned to him full time since December.
Hannah Rawe, a sculptor, was seated next to the foam-filled animal, scratching what were supposed to be tiny hairs into its huge shoulder. At one point, she stopped to ask her boss where the hairs should end and smooth skin should begin. They emailed Alexander Kellner, one of the two curators of the show, a paleontologist at the Museu Nacional in Brazil. Stop at the wrist, he instructed them. And so Ms. Rawe did.
Building Pterosaurs Down to Their Hairs, William Henry Harrison's Killer, Medical Device Loopholes 20:04
Since the fall, Ms. Rawe and all 55 members of the museum's exhibitions team have been working closely with curators, paleontologists and scientific consultants to get their creations - down to a hair - as close to reality as possible. In addition to painters and sculptors, there are computer animators, graphic designers and filmmakers.
These three floors in this part of the museum complex - the Power House, where the coal fires were once stoked to heat the entire museum - are where art meets science. Where theory becomes reality.
With each changing exhibition, including 'Darwin,' 'Whales: Giants of the Deep' and 'The Power of Poison' and now this pterosaurs show, scientists translate their concepts for the visual realm. And artists patiently tease out the minutiae of science from experts in the field.
'It's kind of like the Santa's workshop of the museum,' said the museum's spokesman, Roberto Lebron, about the fifth-floor exhibitions studio. 'These are the people who put it all together.'
For the past 90 years, artists and sculptors - known as museum preparators - have labored in this room. The taxidermy for the museum's famous displays and dioramas were done here in the 1930s. Hanging high on the studio walls are antlers, fish and casts of animal faces from old specimens, as well as one black-and-white photo of workers scraping an elephant hide for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
From Idea to Exhibit
Those animals still fill the museum's halls, frozen in time. But these days, the beehive of activity inside the studio never seems to end. There are usually two special exhibitions each year, with work on one starting just as work on another is ending. The creation of each show begins in much the same way, with executive-level museum administrators learning from, and hashing out ideas with, the curators of each exhibition - this time, Dr. Kellner and Mark A. Norell, head of paleontology for the museum, who has curated more shows than anyone else on staff.
Dr. Norrell, one of the stars of the paleontology world, spends half his time traveling the globe, acquiring fossils in places like China and Romania, and the other half explaining to the staff what to do with them. Early on, the curators decide which animals they want to include. An architectural model is made of the show to figure out what will go where.
'The process is kind of like making a film,' said Dr. Norell, seated in his rounded office in one of the museum's brownstone turrets overlooking Central Park West near West 77th Street. 'You have an idea, then the smaller pitch, then the shooting script, deciding how everything's laid out, what objects and artifacts to use, what the look and feel of the show is going to be; then you start building your models.'
Dr. Norell and his fellow scientists work closely with the artists to come up with drawings for each specimen. Together they decide what the creature will look like, based on fossils and research materials, then what position it will be in: soaring, flapping, mouth open, mouth closed. The color of a long-extinct animal can sometimes be determined by melanosomes - intercellular bodies that might be preserved in the fossils. Minute amounts of chemical residue that hint at color are also sometimes present. Based on discussions and research, the artists make their sketches, which Dr. Norrell must approve, usually with some back and forth. Then the team starts building.
A few exhibitions staff members have biology backgrounds and do much of their own research. Jason Brougham, who is working on a diorama for the coming show, researched the pterosaurs and fish that would be included, as well as the plant life from the early Cretaceous period. He helped advise many of the other artists on anatomy.
While most of the staff was still working on the 'Power of Poison' exhibition this summer, Mr. Brougham was already immersed in prehistoric flying reptiles and their environment. He worked closely with John Maisey, a paleontologist on staff, who has dug in Brazil's fossil-rich Romualdo Formation.
Mr. Brougham studied biology as an undergraduate, switched to scientific illustration, then got his master's in fine art, studying painting. At the museum his past creations include replicas of the human brain and twisting brass models of genome protein folds.
'I came to New York to be a big-shot painter,' Mr. Brougham said. 'But I took a day job here and totally fell in love with scientific art, reconstructing extinct animals. I really found my calling. It's great at cocktail parties: a billionaire hedge-fund manager and a 5-year-old both want to talk to you with equal interest.'
For the diorama, Mr. Brougham also worked closely with Dr. Kellner, using a thalassodromeus skull fossil from which they extrapolated what the rest of the animal might have looked like. They examined a similar pterosaur specimen, tupuxuara, to piece together the body.
'Most of the questions that we actually get from artists, the answer is, 'I don't know,' ' Dr. Kellner said. But the more research that's done, the closer their guess can be on an animal that's been extinct for 66 million years.
'In art you can do whatever you want,' Dr. Kellner said. 'You have an expression of how you feel about a certain subject. But in paleo art, you don't have that liberty. You must try to present the reconstruction of those animals the best way that you can based on true scientific evidence.'
Together, he and Mr. Brougham reconstructed the muscle groups, then placed the eye and soft tissue, including a crest and big gullet, where they should be. The artists at the museum use not only fossils to determine what the animal might have looked like, but also anything and everything else that might help. In the quetzalcoatlus work space, there were photographs of modern birds - a Marabou stork and a crane - and even a photo of a raw chicken cut and splayed open to help envision the musculature.
The curators watch the process closely, touring the work space every few days or, if they're away, receiving photos of the progress and offering tweaks and suggestions. There is a weekly meeting to discuss the show's progress.
A Moving Target
Sometimes, changes in science happen so quickly that an artist's creation must be considerably altered. For instance, Michael Habib, a consulting scientist who specializes in the aeronautics of pterosaurs, was about to publish a new paper, and he suggested all the bodies of the models be slimmed down. The feet of Quetzalcoatlus underwent major changes as well: Five toes per foot were edited down to four; they were shortened and the toenails removed.
Changes on the fifth floor were then communicated to the multimedia artists two floors down so that their work - which included an interactive digital flying pterosaur - would match. Rather than being frustrated by the constant changes to their creations, most of the artists seem proud to be working to get things exactly right.
Tom Doncourt, an artist and a former cabinetmaker who made the original sketch of the quetzalcoatlus for the show based on a skeleton already in the museum, said that the challenge of fast-changing information was not unique to prehistoric reptile science. The Hall of Human Origins, built in the 1990s, was quickly made out of date by anthropological discoveries, he said.
'Sometimes it's obsolete the minute we finish it,' said Mr. Doncourt, now a senior principal preparator at the museum.
The ' Dark Universe ' show in the planetarium had to be adjusted as well. Midway through production last year, a higher-resolution map of the cosmic microwave background was released. The new data was integrated into the show.
'Occasionally,' said Dr. Kellner, 'once you have it done, everything is fine, everyone is happy. But then a year later someone makes a new discovery. This is why we paleontologists are never going to be out of a job.'
Mick Ellison, who has worked with Dr. Norell for 24 years, photographing fossils and reconstructing animals from them, said he did not like relying on previous drawings because there was no telling how accurate they are. Mistakes, he said, can be passed down from artist to artist, year after year. For the 'Whales' exhibition last year, Mr. Ellison, a senior principal artist, used a jawbone to recreate an entire Andrewsarchus, a long-extinct land-dwelling relative of the whale.
'It was this big hairy beast that had always looked this certain way that was completely inaccurate if you looked at the fossil,' Mr. Ellison said. 'It didn't look anything like this image. But everybody copied this image. Discovery Channel, all these dinosaur movies.'
So Mr. Ellison tries not to take anything for granted. 'It's pretty satisfying if you can get close to something that's true,' he said.
Mr. Ellison, who studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and worked as a medical illustrator, has taken anatomy classes to help him recreate creatures great and small.
For the quetzalcoatlus wing he created for the show, Mr. Ellison used an old-school trick to get it just right: the grid method, which dates back to the Renaissance. He placed the huge wing bone model on a giant piece of graph paper and numbered each square so that the finished product - the filled-in wing - would fit the bone exactly. He then went new-school and composed the drawing on the computer. But the wing and the matching computer file were so large that the computer kept freezing. So he broke the file in two.
Most people, he said, think art and science are two different worlds. 'I used to think they were very separate, but they're actually very similar. You have to be creative and you have to be observant.'
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