Paleoartist fills in details of dinosaurs

• Reprints

When Tyler Keillor was in fourth grade in La Grange, he won a Godzilla coloring book for selling lots of school carnival tickets.

“I was really interested in dinosaurs,” he said. One of his favorite pastimes was drawing dinosaurs and dinosaur-like monsters.

Now 38 and living in Brookfield, Keillor is a paleoartist. He prepares dinosaur bones for display, makes skeletal reconstructions and sculpts models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures for museum exhibits. He has worked for about 10 years in the paleontology laboratory headed by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago.

Keillor got into the field by way of special effects, which he studied at Columbia College Chicago. It was fun, but not satisfying.

He got a job making teeth in a dental lab until he found work as an artist at the Field Museum. During his two years there, Keillor built a scale model of Sue, the most complete T. rex skeleton, so scientists could visualize it. In 2001, he moved to his current position.

Keillor created “Paleoart,” an exhibit on display through June 26 at the Lake County Discovery Museum. It includes his models of the dinosaurs Rugops and Herrerasaurus; an ancient fish called Tiktaalik; a giant prehistoric snake called Sanajeh, and a winged reptile, Rhamphorhynchus.

To give the fossil bones a shape and a face, Keillor begins with research.

“We don’t really know what their soft tissue looked like, so that’s where the artistic license comes in,” he said. “I study living animals as a comparative reference for what it might have looked like.”

So he looks at birds, alligators and lizards, which are most closely related to dinosaurs. For example, he figured certain dinosaurs had lips. “They didn’t go around baring their teeth all the time,” he said, because he knew modern lizards’ lips seal their mouths, allowing them to smell properly and preventing dehydration.

To find out just how much lip a dinosaur might have had, he did a thorough study of a preserved Komodo dragon at the Field Museum.

“Every artistic choice I make is based on science,” Keillor said. “If Paul Sereno or anyone comes to me and asks why I did something, I always have a reason for it.”

Still, he admitted, “A lot of this work is open to interpretation.”

To build his dinosaurs, Keillor uses oil-based clay that doesn’t dry out quickly, giving him time to tweak the sculpture and add details until he’s satisfied with the piece. Then he pours a kind of rubber over it, which sets and makes a flexible mold. He fills the mold with resin that hardens into the plasticlike model that will be painted and put on display.

Keillor still finds dinosaurs as exciting as he did when he was in fourth grade.

“Every day I check the news to see what new discovery has been announced,” he said. “There’s really no end in sight to the discoveries.”