Charles R. Knight

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Robert Knight (born October 21, 1874 in Brooklyn , † April 15, 1953 in Manhattan ) was an American artist known for his tremendous influence on paleontology .

Act

Most famous are his depictions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Knight designed numerous natural history museums with his paintings. The representations in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York and in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago , Illinois , for which he made 28 murals, are known. Many of his pictures were later published in books on the subject.

Through his representations, he had a decisive influence on how modern people imagine prehistoric creatures.

Leaping Laelaps by Charles R. Knight, 1897

One of Knight's best-known works at the American Museum of Natural History is Leaping Laelaps from 1897 , which is one of the first paintings to depict dinosaurs as agile and dynamic beings prior to 1960, thus anticipating today's scientific consensus. Even then there were researchers who did not perceive dinosaurs as lazy lizards.

Brontosaurus , 1897.

Another well-known work is his Brontosaurus depiction from 1897. It shows brontosaurs, as many scientists believed at the time, to be semiquatic animals (such as hippos), following the thesis that the enormous body dimensions were only possible because the water relieved their joints. Today, however, it is assumed that all sauropods were real land animals.

Honors

In 1951 he became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology .

literature

  • Marianne Sommer: Face to face with the dinosaurs . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 80, April 4, 2009, p. Z1.

Web links

Commons : Charles R. Knight  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

swell

  1. ↑ a b c Kegel, Bernhard: Extinct to stay: Dinosaurs and their descendants . First edition. Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-8321-9870-1 .
  2. ↑ FAZ from January 5, 2011, page N3: Learning virtue from the primeval world .
  3. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 80 of April 4, 2009, p. Z1
personal data
SURNAME Knight, Charles R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Knight, Charles Robert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1953
Place of death Manhattan