What's In John's Freezer?

Today I’m doing something a bit unusual for this blog, but which very comfortably fits within its theme. Enough talking about my papers and media appearances and such. Too much self-indulgence, I feel. I want to talk about someone else. And then I will get back to the usual business of this blog: sharing the joy of cool anatomy, with a Mystery Dissection/Image post that is long overdue. Yet first, I wish to share the joy of knowing a cool anatomist– and artist.

One of my great shames as a scientist is that I never cultivated some decent artistic skills that I had as a young boy. And now as an anatomist I feel that my work often suffers from a lack of artistic talent (e.g. the image below, which still makes me hang my head in shame). In addition to scientific know-how, anatomy, when done best, demands the eyes and the hands of an artist. I might have the eyes but I definitely lack the hands. I envy people that have both; Julia Molnar from my team is but one example. And for me, encountering them is always a special delight. What follows is my personal perspective on one of the shining stars in the field.

Right ischium (hip bone; pelvis/synsacrum) of an adult ostrich in side view, showing some muscle origins and stuff, with a 1cm scale bar. Cringe. My boring, amateurish, pixelly line drawing from a paper on pelvic evolution. I hate it and wish I’d done better.

Mieke Roth is a scientific illustrator from the Netherlands, with a Masters degree from the prestigious and hallowed halls of Wageningen University.  Her homepage has the tagline “Complex processes beautifully revealed”. This is a wonderfully succinct and eloquent way to describe the magic that she is able to conjure with her skills in scientific illustration. Her “Ultimate Croc Anatomy” project will be the greatest weaving of that sorcery yet. That project is described and will be documented on this page, and has an Indiegogo crowdfunding page here. Mieke describes its goals best:

“I will meticulously dissect a Nile crocodile and document it. I will share the dissection in text, illustrations and video via my website. I will process the data I gathered and each time build a new part of the digital crocodile. From there I will adapt the model for illustrations, books, animations and apps.”

I first became a happy victim of the artistic spells that Mieke casts when I saw her blog entry “How to make an octopus,” which you absolutely must read if you have not already or else you’ll be firmly spanked and sent away from this blog with only lumps of coal in your freezer for Freezermas (what’s Freezermas? Find out soon, and in the meantime be nice– or else!). In her post, Mieke didn’t just look up a picture of an octopus somewhere and redraw it in an abstract, schematic, flat and deceptively simplified way. She went and did her own hands-on research by dissecting an octopus, and then described the steps in converting those observations into a brilliantly novel set of digital illustrations that really brought octopus anatomy to life.

Octopus image by Mieke Roth

Part of what first mesmerized me is that this whole investigative and creative process was lovingly documented on her blog. In doing this, Mieke played the roles of both scientist and artist, by displaying the mundane-but-wonderful labour she did to come up with her final, gorgeous results, and the passion, dedication, scholarship and originality that make her stand head and shoulders above so many gifted scientific or medical illustrators. This thrilled me at both visceral and intellectual levels. It literally gave me chills to witness how good the final product was. As I write this and look back on that blog again, months later, I still feel the magic.

So then I started browsing around her homepage and became punch-drunk from repeated blows of amazement—again and again and again the quality and novelty and thoroughness leaped off the computer screen. Images of nature that I thought I knew well, such as the growth of a chick into a chicken (really great blog here documenting this with sketches), were conveyed in a way that made me see them as if for the first time, with joy and wonder. In the space of a day, I became a huge Mieke Roth fan.

Young chicken sketched by Mieke Roth

And now Mieke is taking it not just a notch, but a huge step, to spend a year documenting the anatomy of the Nile crocodile—how cool is that!?! As an expert in the postcranial anatomy of the Crocodylia, I can confidently state that the available scientific literature on the subject is patchy in coverage and often poor in quality by modern standards. There are big flashes of excellence here and there, such as Larry Witmer’s and Chris Brochu’s teams’ very thorough work on head and neck anatomy, or Colleen Farmer’s and Emma Schachner’s studies of lung morphology. But then I glance at some scholarly books (to avoid offending, I will not cite them here) that are supposed to be key references on the complete anatomy of Crocodylia and I frankly am left cold. While there is some superb work from the 1800s (Gadow, Fürbringer and others come immediately to mind), it is in the flat, often colourless style which the printing technology of that age imposed upon those great masters of anatomy. And while there is superb work by Romer, a tome on the Chinese alligator and a few others, again they tend to be limited to line drawings or spotty coverage of various anatomical systems. We need a visionary with both the scientific and artistic skill to make a subject that could seem dry or arcane become miraculous and accessible. I think you can guess whom I have in mind.

I can think of no one better suited to the ambitious goals and demands of the Ultimate Croc Anatomy project than Mieke Roth. She combines the attention to anatomical detail of a classical 19^th century anatomist with the technical wizardry of a modern digital artist. She will have a supportive team of experts to ensure the content is exceptional and up-to-date. I’ll be one of them (and the crocs will come from my freezer), because of my enthusiasm for  the project, and I’ve been helping to recruit others. So I urge you not just to join in her crowdfunding effort to carry out a very worthy and exciting project that the world can share, but also to share the joy I had in discovering her work by browsing her online collection of awesomeness. I predict that many of you will feel the power of her spell and become Mieke Roth fans, too, if you are not fortunate enough to be one yet.

Squirrel monkey drawing by Mieke Roth