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Science's New Imagery
(October 5, 2004) -
Scrap the drafting table, paper and brushes! Science illustration
has been upgraded over the past 20 years since the dawn of the
computer age. And the possibilities available to artists today
are equally groundbreaking…
This graphic, created by the art staff at National
Geographic, provides a glimpse of the tremendous potential
the use of computers holds for scientific visuals.
Published in the January 2002 issue, the illustration
depicts the evolution of the domestic dog from the wolf. Sloan’s
inspiration was the technique D'Arcy Thompson employed in his
early 20th-century book On Growth and Form to show the
relationships between various animals through the use of skeletons
and a grid. Adapting the technique to the computer, Sloan in turn
showed how all canine breeds are morphological variants of their
cousin, the wolf.
To achieve this result, Sloan and his staff had
to prepare tomograhic scans of grey wolf bones (skull, femurs,
vertebrae, etc.) and then reconstruct the
skeleton using 3D software. The same process was applied to the
skeletons of a Great Dane, Pomeranian, and Dachshund. With the
wolf’s reconstructed skeleton on the grid, it was easy to
enlarge or reduce the image to the scale of the dog skeletons.
So what you see in this picture are not dog skeletons, but a grey
wolf’s skeleton proportioned to those of dogs. That’s
one way of clearly showing how bone is like the clay of evolution.
Meet Christopher Sloan and other image magicians at the session
In the Eye of the Beholder today from 10:15 to 11:45 a.m.
in the Ballroom.
Josée Nadia Drouin
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