Today a new dinosaur is being introduced to the world, and I'm thrilled
and honored that that the paleontologists decided to name it after me.
It's called
Torvosaurus gurneyi.
The dinosaur, which was discovered in Portugal, is one of the largest
carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic and the largest land-predator
discovered in Europe.
Lead author Christophe Hendrickx of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu of Lourinhã says, “With a skull of 115 cm,
Torvosaurus gurneyi was...an active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm.”
Mr. Hendrickx says he chose the name because of a childhood fascination with the book that I wrote and illustrated called
Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.
When I introduced Dinotopia more than 22 years ago, I received many
letters from young children who said they wanted to become artists or
paleontologists. It gives me great pleasure to hear from some of them
all these years later and to find out that they're doing for a living
what they dreamed about as kids.
Dinotopia is a fantasy world, but it started with the science.
Many dinosaur paleontologists, such as Michael Brett-Surman, Jack
Horner, Phil Currie, and Ken Carpenter helped me to visualize the
extinct animals that I painted in the book, and one of them even curated
an exhibition of Dinotopia original artwork for natural history museum.
What inspired me to write the book was the new dynamic vision of
dinosaurs that emerged from the work of those very scientists.
Imagination is at the heart of all science, but it's especially at the
core of paleontology. Paleontologists have a highly disciplined form of
imagination, similar to that of a detective. I'm in awe of how they can
pull together scraps of evidence and then—guided by patience and
skepticism—build a complete vision of a world that we will never see.
Next time I return to doing paintings of Dinotopia, I look forward to
visualizing Torvosaurus—perhaps with Mr. Hendrickx riding it.
