If you love dinosaurs and paleo art, youll love Justin Gibbens, too. This is the central Washington artists Conjunctive Barn Owls from 2008, made with watercolor, gouache, pencil, and green tea on paper. Gibbens is represented by G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle.
If you love dinosaurs and paleo art, you'll love Justin Gibbens, too. This is the central Washington artist's Conjunctive Barn Owls from 2008, made with watercolor, gouache, pencil, and green tea on paper. Gibbens is represented by G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle. Courtesy of the artist and G. Gibson Gallery

There's a new T-Rex in town (meaning a new-to-us, very, very old one that hung out in Montana for millions of years), and this will excite many in the human species.

Why are the mighty dinosaurs, and the T. rex in particular, so fascinating to we who believe ourselves to be the most powerful creatures now on earth? Do we want to relate to them or to use them as a departure from every single thing that we know?

"A dinosaur is a muse," wrote Ross Andersen in his 2015 story "The Artists Who Paint Dinosaurs."

They left remains, but only skeletal ones. "Everything else," Andersen opined, "must be pieced together, or imagined."

Dinosaurs: the perfect blend of fact and fiction?

Until the event of the Burke Museum's Dino Weekend arrives in March, when the T. rex skull is scheduled to be put on display for the first time (the entire beast shall be pieced together for the new museum's opening in 2019, is the plan), you might enjoy this blog recommended by Anderson, Echoes from the Antediluvian, entirely devoted to Paleo art.