INTRODUCTION: You had better enjoy reading this text while you can, because only in the Talkabout will I step out of character and talk about the creatures of OPUS: Dinosaur, not as living creatures, but as they are: stone and imagination. In the rest of the pages of OPUS: Dinosaur, I will refer to the organisms I have painted in the present tense, as if they were alive and I have personally observed them.  I couldn't have, of course, but that isn't the point.

     There are several ways to get around in OPUS: Dinosaur.  The principal means of navigation is the Species List .  Dinosaurs (as well as other Mesozoic organisms) are organized, first by period (Triassic, Jurassic, or Cretaceous), then by general location, then alphabetically. This particular organization gives the reader a feel of what dinosaurs lived with what other dinosaurs, but I appreciate that lay people find this format daunting. If one wants to find, say, a Tyrannosaurus rex on the species list, one must first know where and when the dinosaur lived, information that is not at all people's fingertips. For these poor, lost souls, I have constructed the Picture Index , an alphabetical list of all the illustrations on OPUS: Dinosaur.  Each thumbnail picture is annotated with the name of whatever beast, and clicking on that name will whisk the user away to the page for that species.

    A note on accuracy: Dinosaurs have left only their bones (and, rarely, other traces) as partial and obscure clues to their life on Earth.  As an illustrator of dinosaurs (as well as some of their contemporaries), I create pictures of what these organisms might have looked like in life.  Such reconstructions are almost certainly far from the truth, and their derivation from reality can only be judged by the discriminating audience.  To become such a person of knowledge, you may use the links I provide at the bottom of each species page, which link to other pages containing information pertinent to whatever species you are studying.  These links function as second-opinions and as citations for the references I used in my own reconstruction.  

     Since I have little access to the real dinosaur fossils, I cannot in good conscience display skeletal reconstructions.  Although I think that these diagrams are essential for paleoart, I will not make any myself as they would only be copies of other people's work.  Besides, there is a chance that the reconstructions I use are wrong and if I were to copy them I would only be propagating the misinformation.  I will not draw real bones unless I have firsthand access to them.  However,  I will provide direct links to other pages that may contain such information.  Whenever a skeletal reconstruction can be found for a particular animal, I will provide a link to it.  I reiterate that the the images I have produced and the text I have written on dinosaur pages do not represent data, they represent interpretations.

    Of course, I am sure that, in my reconstructions, I have made many paleontological blunders, I would greatly appreciate any criticism anyone gives me.  

    In other words...

    CONTACT ME: Please email to alert me to any mistakes I may have made---in fact, I really enjoy talking about my work (to tell the truth, it's an ego trip).   I scattered links to my email address throughout my webpages, but here is my address just in case you've missed it: dbensen@bowdoin.edu

    I should say now that many people have been of great help to me.  I give thanks to the people who helped me in some particular way on those particular pages that they helped to create, but some people must be thanked for their overarching help in general. Professor Ray Stanford, I thank for going a six-month-old OPUS: Dinosaur in its entirety and helping me to correct scientific errors.  To him, I give a heartfelt "thanks" (and also recognition on almost ever page of OPUS: Dinosaur ).  Also, I'd like to thank Sam Barnett for being a sort of general email buddy.  Sam gave me a great gift of allowing me to mother (or, at least, to midwife) another webpage into existence.  Now, that was good for my ego.  Finally, I thank Jordan Mallon and Demitrios Vital for thinking enough of my skills to let me critique all of their dinosaur pictures and critique mine in return. 

    Email might not be for everyone, however.  Perhaps this medium of exchange is too harsh a medium for some timid souls, and for them I have created the Guest Book .  This page is not particularly advanced, as guestbooks go (all it is, is emails cut-and-pasted together).  For this reason, when you Sign my Guest Book , your mail program will open and you will send your message to my email address.  Obviously, many people are confused by my strange guestbook, and so few people can get up the gumption to actually sign the damn thing.  

   
AS FOR MYSELF:
    "I am not the fairest flower in the garden, nor am I a thorn in any man's path...People may think well or ill of me as they please: I act as my nature prompts me."
                                                                ---Sauda , translation by Khurshidul Islam and Ralph Russell

"The slotted spoon can catch the potato"
                                                                                                           ---Jack's mother from Into the Woods by Steven Sondheim
    At the risk of exposing my person to predations of the internet, I feel my pages' viewers might like to know a bit more about OPUS: Dinosaur's creator.  If this is the case, then continue reading.

    I was born in Chicago, where my parents had gone to college (University of Chicago) and subsequently married.  For my first three years of life, we lived in a small apartment in Hyde Park (next door to the university).  We then moved to Berton-Judson, a dormitory of the University of Chicago on the outskirts of Hyde Park, where my parents lived as resident heads.  I still have no idea how much the experience warped me. Over the course of my early childhood, I attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School, a good thing since without the Lab school's attention, my eye-tracking problems would probably have prevented me from ever learning to read.

   When I was about ten, we moved from the Chicago to Maine, where my mom and dad worked at Bowdoin college and Colby college, respectively.  We lived in the small town of Oakland, which is a little west of Waterville, which is a little north of Augusta, which is in the interior-southern part of the state (if you still cannot figure out where I lived at that time, I was north of Boston and south of Quebec).  It was in Oakland I went through middle and junior high school and developed my embryonic tastes in reading, painting, and nature.

    Then, after almost exactly five years in Maine, we moved again: this time to the city of Stockton, California. Stockton was about as far from Maine as one can get, both physically and philosophically, to the extent that Stocktonian store clerks thought that Maine was "somewhere in Europe".  The city, in the heart of the San Joaquin agrobuisness nexus, possessed excellent produce, especially citrus (as cliché as that is---I like oranges), but the weather was terrible.  For the four years I lived there, attending the Bear Creek High School, a sorry example of the depths to which a public school can fall when education is decided by bond measure.  The school was overcrowed and underbudget to the extent that my graduating class was larger than the entire population of my college, which I will get to soon.   However, the school had good teachers who cared about education, and so I graduated knowing more than I did going in.

    Soon after I graduated high school, my family moved again, this time to Lolo, Montana (very close to Missoula).  The move didn't have much impact on me, however, since at the same time, I went to the other side of the country, and began to attend Bowdoin College, in Maine.  

    That brings us up to the present day, and the present internet server.  This website, the food I eat, and the internet connection I use, are all property of Bowdoin College.  Speaking as a junior with little basis for comparison (aside from my 7 year stay in BJ) , Bowdoin is an excellent school, but I can say little about it that has not already been said.  At the moment, I am a Biology/Asian Studies major, with concentrations in evolution/macro-biology and Japan, respectively. 

    As for my genetic history, my family traces its ancestry back to, well, Northern Europe.  Pick any place south of Norway, north of France, east of Ireland, and west of Russia, and you should find that my kin have lived there at some time or another (although the chances are greatest in Germany and Norway). My current family lives all over the place. Some of my dad's family is still in Germany, and most of my mom's family lives in Montana.  However, since my grandpa (my mom's father) was part of a family of 18, I have second and third cousins scattered across the world. 

    That done with, my interests include science (esp. biology), painting, reading, singing, Broadway Musicals, writing, history, languages, figure skating, gardening, food of all descriptions, hockey, swimming, and taiko in no particular order.  Other than my mother language, English, I am slightly proficient in Japanese, less so in French, and I am learning Bulgarian (the most romantic of all the Slavic languages).  Aside from my art, and my writing (to the extent published on these pages), my other hobbies are under-represented on the internet, but you may wish to visit my taiko site.  If you live in or around the Brunswick area, sign up for practices!

    For those who are artistically inclined, my media are most often pencil, watercolor, and digital (Photoshop).  My favorite canvass is cold-pressed 100% cotton, but any cold-pressed is fine.  In some paintings, I use oil pastels and gouache as well as watercolor, and ever now and then I use pen as well (Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs).  Recently, I have been drifting away from gouache, and using the more traditional method of leaving blank paper to represent white, and we'll see how that goes.

       Having been around for quite some time, OPUS: Dinosaur and its art has achieved some fame (or notoriety) in the outside world.  My work has been displayed in the children's museum of Lexington Kentucky ( Scipionyx ), Archaeopteryx, a children's book published by Abdo & Daughters in 2001 ( Confuciusornis  ---note: the picture now displayed is not the same one that appears in the book),  a CD-ROM published by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study ( Beipiaosaurus ), Turtles, Tortoises, and Terrapins, Survivors in Armor by Ronald Orenstein, published by Firefly in 2001 (Santanachelys )(sadly, without credit), "Plants that Time Forgot" by Nina A. Koziol, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 5th, 2002, section 15, page 5 ( Dryosaurus ), and the 2003 edition and onward of the CD-ROM 'Dinosaur Encylopedia' (various).  OPUS: Dinosaur was mentioned and described in Dinosaurs On-Line: A Guide to the Best Dinosaur Sites on the Internet by Kathryn Gabriel and R. L. Jones, published in 2000 by Cumberland House and has been used for various talks given at Society of Vertebrate Paleontology symposia (including Andrew Farke's ceretopsian lecture in 2004).

    My only non-prehistoric artwork to gain the attention of the public (to my knowledge) was a pen-and-ink called "Fish, Bird, and Tenrec", which was displayed briefly in Stockton, California's Hagen Museum.  

    In the digital world, my work is rather more widespread.  The following is a list of websites that display my art (if you see any that aren't on the list, please let me know


    Unless otherwise stated, all of the images and text contained in my pages are mine and cannot be copied without my permission. 

NOTES ON THE TALKABOUT ILLUSTRATIONS:

    The Talkabout is not precisely a part of OPUS: Dinosaur, and so I use it as a dumping ground for the non-  Mesozoic artwork that I do produce on occasion.  These illustrations require a little backstory, and I will try to give it here.

    The creature at the top of this page is a green-billed fruit-arbro ( Pacifonyx tucanoides), part of the weird and wonderful menagerie of The Speculative Dinosaur Project .   An inhabitant of the Amazon rainforest on a world never struck by the Chicxulub boiloid, the green-billed fruit-arbro is a placid eater of fruits and nuts, although it is a distant descendant of the ferocious deinonychosaurians.

    My own picture, taken in winter 2003 for the Bowdoin college yearbook.  Note the gomidaiko a musical instrument of great beauty and grace, which some uneducated troglodytes might dare to use to hold their garbage.

    Amanda Lee, one of my very few human paintings.  She was a character in a manga I tried to create sophmore year in college.  Not much came of it, but I do have some fondness for this painting.  The scenario is a sort of 11th century Japan set in Maine. :) They have a talking polar bear, which I thought was particularly cool.

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