Michel-Antoine Xhingnesse: October 16, 2026

Title: Dinosaur Aesthetics

Abstract:Images of dinosaurs—“palaeoart”—are all around us, and are among the most-reproduced artworks of all time. For a great many of us, particular images are old childhood friends. Artists have been producing them for almost 200 years now, yet you won’t see any of their paintings in the Louvre, the Met, or the VAG; crack open an art history textbook, and you will never find a reference to them, or even to scientific illustration more broadly. In this talk, I will ask and answer one very basic question: what is palaeoart, exactly? Professional palaeoartists have tended to emphasize the scientific accuracy of their work, but I will argue that considerations of extensional adequacy—that is, of being true to the variety of works which have historically counted as palaeoartistic—should motivate a degree of caution in tethering our definition to standards of accuracy. These standards, I argue, are better conceived as grounding evaluative norms rather than definitional criteria. Instead, I argue that the key notion in a definition of palaeoart should be that of representation; that is, of what it means for some image to represent a given dinosaur, pterosaur, or marine reptile.