Mauricio Antón is a world-renowned paleoartist, paleontologist and is the Basler chairholder at ETSU.
Antón specializes in the reconstruction of extinct life and is well known for his drawings, sketches and paintings of early humans, vertebrae and carnivores.
Antón has been hosting art exhibits of his creations that go through the reconstruction process of fossil hominids, which demonstrate the process from fossils to the reconstructed digital art of early humans as we know them. The most recent being on March 10 in the D.P. Culp Student Center’s Martha Street Culp Auditorium, which covered Ardipithecus to Neanderthals and everything in between.
The presentation informed listeners on the body structure, skin color, skeletal similarities and differences, sexual dimorphism and evolution of early humans. Fossils were also present for attendees to go look at and compare to modern human structure.
The first Neanderthal was discovered over 150 years ago, and specialists have been trying ever since to recreate the appearance of the beings and what their life and death could have looked like.
Antón has been doing just this for over three decades and is among some of the top paleoartists in the world. He has worked on creating the first reconstructions of the appearance of early humans that have been previously unknown to the world and science.
The objective of the art that Antón creates is to recreate how historical life looked like through images. This is how science and art fuse together to be able to intersect the scientific information into an accurate image.
A wide demographic of people were in attendance, but all had the same curiousness of how models of our early ancestors were formed.
“I think the most interesting thing is the way that they reconstruct the bodies,” said Daniel Norman, paleobiology student. “They take the bones and scan them, make the muscle attachments, put on the skin to make it out to something.”
Antón expressed how the media often distorts the images of early humans, and it is his job to make the most accurate image possible.
“I also think it is interesting how the media sort of wants to portray ancient humans as violent animals than what is more likely, which was very similar to us,” said Norman.
Antón will host his final public lecture titled “First-hand Study of Extant Animals as a Reference for Natural History Reconstructions” on April 9.
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