Charles R. Knight was painting hadrosaurs with "cheeks" way back in 1931

[Thomas Yazbek]

Has anybody ever commented on this? My impression is he would not have painted anything not okayed by a consulting scientist.

Thomas

[Thomas Richard Holtz]

What exactly do you mean about commenting on this?

Yes, Charles R. Knight did work with a variety of researchers for this and his other art. The details here reflect some ideas at the time that have since been shown to be wrong (i.e., putting an ankylosaurid tail on a panoplosaurid body; the crest along the Edmontosaurus back; hadrosaurids as semi-aquatic; etc.) But some items here remain speculative or unresolved (for instance, the possibility of a skin flap attaching the back of the crest of Parasaurolophus to the neck.)

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Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
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[Thomas Richard Holtz]

D'oh! I should have looked at the Subject line, I guess...

The idea of the possibility for ornithischian cheeks does go way back, but has been the subject of debate all along. With art, though, you need to take a position: you can't paint it as simultaneously cheeked and cheekless!

[Stephen Poropat]

I think Knight's hadrosaurs became cheekier as time progressed.

His 1897 Hadrosaurus lacks cheeks.

But his 1909 Trachodons seem to have a bit more cheek than the 1897 Hadrosaurus (both images posted on Facebook by Laurence Street:https://www.facebook.com/groups/41244155617/posts/10171855984675618/; the latter looks like it is from a book but I know not which one).

The Trachodons above seem to have a little less cheek than the various hadrosaurs in the painting Thomas Yazbek sent through. According to Czerkas & Glut (1982: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Cavemen), that painting was done between 1925 and 1930. 

Finally, Knight's Parasaurolophus in National Geographic in 1942 is pretty cheeky too.

In Brown's 1916 paper describing the complete Corythosaurus skeleton at the AMNH, several hadrosaurs are depicted with cheeks in illustrations by Richard Deckert. I wonder if this had something to do with the increased cheekiness. The 'mummies' probably precipitated the original cheek increase; one of them was found in August 1908 by Charles H. and George F. Sternberg, according to Osborn (1909: Science; 1911: American Museum Journal [which includes Knight's painting]; 1912: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History [which also includes Knight's painting, as well as a line drawing of the animal in life that I presume was done by either Knight or Erwin Christman - the 1909 painting was stated to have been done under Osborn's direction).

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Dr Stephen F. Poropat

Deputy Director

Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre

School of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Curtin University

Bentley, Western Australia

Australia 6102

https://stephenporopat.weebly.com/

[Thomas Yazbek]

I guess I just wondered if anybody noticed the "cheeks" in this painting before. It was done over 4 decades before Galton proposed that ornithischians had "cheeks", and most mainstream paleoart up until c. 1980 didn't show cheeks on ornithischians. So I'm just wondering where the cheeks on the Edmontosaurs here came from. An invention of Knight, or something he learned from somebody else?

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[Thomas Richard Holtz]

Andrea Cau has pointed out that Lull suggested a muscular cheek in ornithischians as early as 1903:

Lull, R. S. 1903: Skull of Triceratops serratus. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 19, 685-695.

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[Jaime Headden]

The curious fact of the cause for putting cheeks on ornithiscians has used the embayed tooth row as the primary point in favor, followed by the secondary incidence of a flared jugal and its comparison to the expanded zygomatic arch in mammals.

Problematically, most mammals lack a strongly embayed tooth row, and while the zygomatic arch does create a large space between tooth row and lateral zygo-mandibular muscular architecture, and thus an internal "cheek" pocket (but this being about leverage and not creating a "pocket," in contradiction to almost all arguments to the latter, in which such a feature is an exaptation of that leverage and not a cause), we're left with an ascientific claim that only caught on in the midd twentieth century.

The problem about cheeks in ornithischians really did hit a high note in the 50s when the specific claims to its evidence (championed largely by Galton, but the onus falls on many of us who took his claims without evidence) were heeded without pushback into the 2000s.

Charles R. Knight was simply illustrating ideas in variety, the way many paleoartists do today, without each piece being a specific, backed up claim. One can draw and illustrate also on commission without "believing it" or, indeed, trying to ask others to believe it. In contrast to some other artists, paleoart is an artistic discipline first and foremost, meaning it is essentially fallible, and attempting to have a conversation, to convey an idea and induce feedback. That essential fallibility is why the late Dr Norell told me why he prefer Mick Ellison, who illustrated so many of the AMNH's paleontological discoveries coming out of the Gobi in the 1990s--2010s, were essentially interpretive line drawings. He was trying to limit the subjectivity of an inherently subjective medium.

The art really is sometimes ... just art. It doesn't surprise me that many students of early dinosaurian anatomy in the late1800s--early 1900s saw that hadrosaurs had an unusual dental arrangement and jaw shape, and inferred some extraneous tissue beyond it, just as some ankylosaurs were being described with large plates covering these gaps. Just as Charles Knight illustrated wading dinosaurs and fully-landbound, non-tail dragging ones, some literally leaping, hews to his previous experience as a wildlife illustrator, principally concerned with mammals, and seeing these creatures through a principally mammalian lens. Since mammals have cheeks, it would then stand for his work to suggest them.

Cheers,

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Jaime A. Headden

The Bite Stuff: http://qilong.wordpress.com/

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth" - P. B. Medawar (1969)