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This was something of an experiment to be certain. I had been working in LA at the Natural History Museum, with the curators in order to create a series of drawing that were to accompany the grand re-opening of the mammal wing of the museum. The project was abruptly aborted, and the work I had done went by the wayside. But even in projects that fail or remain incomplete there is learning to be had. And during the development of the images I learned a great deal from the curators, such as how to make a drawing of an animal with only the skull to work from. Also, during the project I had contacted the noted paleoartist Carl Buell, who remains my friend and mentor to this day. Also I've only added these two extinct animals to the image library at some point I'll try and add some more. If you have a suggestion of an extinct mammal or any extinct animal you'd like to see illustrated please send me an email.
The massive amount of mammals that have lived on the earth and gone extinct is amazing in their diversity and variance of size. Some of the most interesting occurred during the the Pleistocene Epoch, which lasted from 1.65 million until about 10,000 years ago. During that time numerous types of land mammals inhabited the area that is now the Americas. While no one is completely sure why, most of the larger mammals died off, including the Saber-Tooth Cat, the Megatherium - which was a giant ground sloth of South America, the Mastodon, the Dire Wolf and the Short-Faced Bear. Some theories are that a small meteor affected the local climate, that the invasion of early humans hunted them to extinction, or that there was enough of a climate change to drastically effect them - or that it was a combination of some or all of these factors. A few years ago, a near perfectly preserved baby wooly mammoth was found, and it it hoped that one day DNA taken from the animal might give scientist the ability to "grow" one of these long extinct animals.
