This is a transcript. Access the episode here.
Alyssa Fjeld (00:24)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Fossils in Fiction. How are you today, Travis?
Travis Holland (00:28)
going pretty well. Everything’s nice for September. How have you been?
Alyssa Fjeld (00:32)
⁓ you know, they said, wake me up when September ends, we’re in it now and I have no choice but to work. So work we must. I’m tracing bugs.
Travis Holland (00:41)
The millennial nostalgia. Love it.
I went and saw Green Day when they came to Sydney earlier this year and it was a fantastic show. They played the whole album. yeah, it was really good. It was like being back at school.
Alyssa Fjeld (00:50)
No way!
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely the sound of high school, you know, it’s like I’m glad that all of my Bush era protest music is once more in vogue That’s fun. I don’t have to learn new songs
Well, I believe we’re here to hear from your interview with Karim today. Karim is a very, gosh, prolific figure in the online paleo space who’s run a number of these virtual paleo art galleries now. Tell us a little bit about how your interview went.
Travis Holland (01:23)
Yeah. So Karim has become known for running these virtual paleo art gallery and also for regular meetups with other paleo artists. brings them all together for chats over Zoom or it’s not exactly Zoom, but an online video chat hub. Karim himself does a bunch of conservation, wildlife, paleo art, including this fantastic piece.
featuring a Pangolin, which we’ll talk about a bit during the interview. But his art is fantastic. And I really wanted to get to the heart of, you know, his work connecting people together through, particularly through the virtual Paleo Art Gallery. So he invites artists to come and display their work and puts it all together on display, as well as have these little launches and these sessions. And he’s building a wonderful little community of people interested in Paleo art or Paleo artists.
I think it’s great. yeah, have a listen to the interview.
Travis Holland (02:17)
had a good look across your website and I know that you’re a software developer by day and a paleo art curator by night. That’s a really interesting combination. How do those two worlds come together for you?
Karim (02:29)
They really, do they come together? So the thing is when I’m like you, I’m a paleo artist, like I call myself paleo and sometimes white life artist. And I drew and painted for years already. And right now it is my place to calm down. So I’m sitting in front of a laptop or PC all day. So I really enjoy to put that aside, take a brush and a pencil and just paint like away from the…
Travis Holland (02:37)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (02:55)
technology world and everything around it. And for the curation part, which is happening only online, it just evolved. So I cannot escape the laptop completely, but I try to.
Travis Holland (03:10)
you mentioned the curation. Could you tell me about that moment when you thought, what if I sort of take my art and bring together this virtual space where paleo art can be appreciated and then bring all these other artists together as well, which is some of what you’ve been doing.
Karim (03:24)
So initially it was not about my artwork only. it is the local community I’m part of and they do an annual exhibition for like end of the year for roughly like four weeks. And I thought, okay, maybe it’s a good idea for everyone who has no time to look at the artwork or cannot reach it because it’s really local community to get it online on their website.
Travis Holland (03:31)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (03:47)
and tried this out and went really well. Also, the artist said, OK, that’s a completely new thing. Why not? Let’s try it out. And at some point, thought it was December last year, I thought, why not do the same stuff for paleo art? Because there is no such space where you can see the art of all the artists across the world in one space. So I reached out to some people, said, hey, let’s connect.
Would you be willing to contribute to the gallery? Which is a tricky thing because they sent me their artwork. what they, like some of the people really do it for work. Like it’s a day-to-day business. So they sent me something, they make their money with. So it’s a really sensible thing. But I’m really happy that they’re so open-minded. Yeah, sure, we can do that.
Travis Holland (04:29)
Mm-hmm.
So what’s your approach to recruiting artists? Just people you come across and how do you reach out to them? How do you make that pitch and make that connection?
Karim (04:41)
Initially, was just last year, I went to TetZooCon the convention from Darren Naish in the UK, and met some people there. And then I just reached out to them and said, okay, like, I already reached out at the beginning to people I already knew. And at some point, I just started to reach out to random people and artists across the world, which
Travis Holland (04:51)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (05:05)
like artwork I find really inspiring or amazing and just saw how it goes. And at some point, people also reached out to me. So I got emails via my website or Instagram and was really happy because they, they want to be part of the exhibition. So they spread the word somehow and was really great to hear because they also would like to connect to other artists. So I had like some people which are
which can barely found online. So they don’t have a website or living in South America or whatever. And they said, it’s a great opportunity to meet people across the ocean or something like that.
Travis Holland (05:42)
you’re acting as a real kind of broker building these little networks and connections and you have the networking sessions, but then you bring in people together in different spaces whose work might not be brought together like that, but you’re doing it all sort of online. So how do you, how do you approach this sense of community building in digital spaces?
Karim (06:01)
So of course I need to reach out to people. I need to be lucky that they are open to contribute and want to join the networking sessions. But for them, it’s more easy to engage in these online sessions. Of course they take their time, like prepare the artwork, send it to me. But I have the feeling that it’s more easy to just open any web browser, join the meeting and…
join any discussion or just enjoy listening. So for the community, it made it more easy instead of go. That’s the thing, like it’s more difficult nowadays sometimes to just go outside somewhere and meet people. And right now there are some artists who like turn off the, like they keep the camera turned off and just say, I’m just listening. And then in the next session, they keep like, they turn on the camera and.
Further, are involved in the conversation or discussion, so they also try to be more active step by step, which is really helpful, I guess.
Travis Holland (06:54)
Yeah. So starting to build that, I guess, that habit for people and, know, encouraging people to come back and listen to others talk. That kind of thing works pretty well.
Karim (07:03)
Yeah. I like the goal is to learn to just connect and learn. I, besides the, like the networking session, the first, the very first one was like a show and tell. So I had like 22, 23 artists. We did one and a half hours show and tell, just tell people like, what am I doing? Where do I live? What is my technique?
Then with the next kind of rotation, so I change artists like every few months, we have the first half is show and tell, like people can tell something about the artwork if they like. And the second half is a discussion to a specific topic. So I invite people, last time was about conventions and networking. So I had of course, James Pascoe.
I had some people invited from Germany and UK, tried also from the US to just talk a bit like how are conventions different in the different countries, how is networking different and how important is it. And the next one will be about publishing paleo art books. So I invited three people who are going to or already published paleo art books to just get some insights and learn from each other.
Travis Holland (08:06)
Mm-hmm.
the thing is that a lot of people try to do these kinds of things. I think you’re underplaying the difficulty sometimes in negotiating some of this and actually bringing people together from different parts of the world. Like I think it’s a really important skill to be able to do that and be a kind of nice approachable person that people are willing to engage with and trust with their work. Right. And you’re doing a really good job of that.
Karim (08:37)
Thanks a lot. I never thought about it like that. The thing is, takes a lot of time because people are really open-minded, especially in the paleo art bubble. But people need to be approached four, five, six times sometimes ⁓ without getting annoyed. So I don’t want to annoy people with my requests.
Travis Holland (08:53)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (08:59)
when they don’t respond like after, I don’t know, the third time, I say, okay, maybe in a few months or whatever. But most of the time they just forget about it. So you’re right, it takes time and effort. I’m maybe not aware of that completely, but I really enjoy it, yeah.
So usually, gallery is about 2D paintings or sculptures. And what I also put some emphasis on that it’s for any kind of artwork. So it’s not only for traditional painting or
digital painting. We now have like one exhibition about 3D modeling, so I tried to put 3D models in the exhibition so you can view them from like any angle. But it’s also about poetry, so we had two people and one of them is Alyssa who tried out with paleo poetry, paleo poems just to display. So these are also different kinds of art.
I want to showcase. it’s art is not just painting and drawing. It’s also 3D modeling is also sculptures, also poetry, also writing books. So there are so many areas of art that I would like to show them all to people, especially poems I didn’t see before. And there was actually one person
also said I never saw like that another person is also doing poems like paleo poems before so he shared his for the next exhibition which was really great.
Travis Holland (10:26)
let’s switch to your own artwork a little bit. You describe yourself as a, I think a conservation artist is what your website says and maybe also for, you know, so focusing on wildlife and conservation issues. And I might start with one particular piece, which is a piece that was selected for display. It’s called, We Saw It Coming. And it’s a drawing of a pangolin that is sort of transforming into a fossil.
It’s a really powerful piece there. Tell me about that piece.
Karim (10:54)
about that piece. to first of all about the conversation thing I try to find, I’m not necessarily trying to find a niche for myself, but try to explore different areas. So I’ve been painting dinosaurs and extinct animals for quite some time. And last year I found the kind of
competition like they are called explorers against extinction. They have wildlife art competition. And of course you cannot send a piece from the Spinosaurus to like this kind of stuff. So they are explicit like they are asking for endangered animals, not already extinct, like really close to extinction or really endangered. And many people try to
showcase elephants, tigers, polar bears. Also, pangolin, it’s very often, but I try to have a different approach. I don’t want to be hyper realistic because I don’t have the patience and skills for that yet. But I try to find something which is catchy and tells a story and was not there before. This was my approach. And it was
a random thought to just take the animal and cut it in half. So I have 50 % skeleton, 50 % full body animal and try to combine it like that. And also the title, we saw it coming, is a reference to a small detail in the eye. Like you can see two people approaching the animal when you really go close to the artwork. And I really tried…
Travis Holland (12:24)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (12:27)
to tell a story. this was one of the first times I did that because it’s difficult to create an art piece and really tell a story with just a static image basically.
Travis Holland (12:38)
Yeah, it’s looking at this particular piece, the expression, you know, without anthropomorphizing it too much, but the expression on the Pangolin is kind of mournful, right? And it’s almost the last Pangolin, I guess, is the story that it’s telling there. it’s because it’s looking to the future and kind of glancing to the viewer, but
Karim (12:53)
you
Travis Holland (13:00)
by the same token, the past there for it and its species is fossils. It is, you know, death. And it’s an extraordinarily powerful piece. I can now see the detail in the eye there that you were talking about ⁓ as well. Yeah.
Karim (13:15)
The funny thing is we had it on display in London. So was really lucky. I didn’t expect it. So I just sent it to them and they selected it for display in a gallery in London. And the funny thing is that especially children saw it. Not adults, but children saw the detail and asked about it, which was really interesting to see.
Travis Holland (13:36)
Yeah. I’ve discussed this with a few artists. James, James Pascoe was one where we were talking about his models and the fact that children will see details that adults just don’t see sometimes. And maybe it’s their different physical perspective. They’re, know, shorter or they see it at a different angle, but yeah, kids will often be much more perceptive about an artwork. Whereas I guess adults kind of look at it and then move on. You know, they don’t.
engaged necessarily.
Karim (14:04)
Yeah, might be true. Even in a place where it’s just about the artwork, it was interesting to see.
Travis Holland (14:10)
think you’ve mentioned something about that with regard to people viewing paleo art on social media that maybe we just scroll past and don’t really pay attention to it. Is that something you’re trying to address with the virtual galleries?
Karim (14:24)
This is at least what I tell people. So usually when you have artwork like what I don’t know how many like centimeter or inches that it but you see some new artwork and see, that looks nice but you have not enough space to really look at the details. You also don’t take your time because
Like you have your feet, you scroll and scroll and scroll and say, ⁓ that’s nice. I give it a like or even a comment and then just continue. And with the gallery on the phone or on the PC, you should just take your time. Like you can click on the artwork, you can zoom in. When you visit the gallery, you already took your time to just view at the artwork.
So maybe it also encourages you to take more of your time to look at the details.
Travis Holland (15:13)
Switching back then to your own work, tell me a bit more about your development as an artist. What have you focused on? What’s been a recurring theme for you? Are there any lessons that you learned that you can pass on?
Karim (15:26)
So the recurrent theme is never do the same. Basically. I try, I just, I had some break from painting and drawing and I don’t know why. And I came back to it, I don’t know, three or four years ago and then started with my first post on Instagram and whatever and really tried to do it.
couple of times a week to just improve myself, but there’s no recurrent theme. So what I started with was like, I look out for recent publications, see what’s interesting to me and find some style to depict an animal I never depicted or visualized before. And then I tried different things out. So there is no specific style now. Like there is a comfort style. So when you go through my Instagram,
there are black and white images, so this is my comfort style, but I try new things here and there. Also different kind of animotes, so there’s no recurrent theme. But I have to say that, like from the development as an artist, of course my skills grew in the last couple of years, but also with being more more…
I would say established in the community or known in the community. I also found more motivation to improve myself, not only the artistic skills, but also in the scientific way, like to be more accurate with the animals and to really, because last year I was on Tedzoolcon, they did and also did it on DinoCon, an artist exhibition on one evening. And I want to meet the people on the same level. So,
Either I approach an animal completely in an artistic way or more scientifically correct perspective. And I grew, I grew with the community, I say.
Travis Holland (17:15)
So obviously you, you, I think you mentioned you draw as a, as a kid. So you kind of grew up drawing, but did you do any training in the field or you mostly self-taught?
Karim (17:26)
No training in the field. It’s just me at home. Sometimes with some online videos, but no real workshops. I just try to improve myself. Maybe with painting sessions with friends or watch some videos or go to some gallery and see, what is the style I could try.
try out but there was no time in my life where I did any kind of extensive workshop or in Germany like you can also go to university and do like art school and stuff but I never did that.
Travis Holland (18:02)
Do you have then any advice for other artists that are kind of trying to forge their own pathway in the same way?
Karim (18:08)
there are many artists who do not have the
are not artists by training, let’s say it like that. But improve themselves, reach out to people, ask for feedback. Recently, I reached out to just random to a dinosaur park and said, hey, this is what I’m doing. Is there any possibility to be engaged in some painting for a current whatever project?
end of last year, I was the first time on a makers market and tried to sell some prints and it went really well. So maybe you just need to try it out and see where it goes, get some feedback. last week, Friday, the panel discussion where we had like the last point, how to get into your field.
So none of the panelists really artist by training. They just said, okay, you have a foundation, you have a passion and you need to train a lot, but also need to be social enough and bold enough to just reach out to people and see where it goes.
Travis Holland (19:11)
Take the opportunities that you can see there, but also make your own, I guess.
Karim (19:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sometimes works out. I guess nowadays it’s bit easier to do things online and try to reach out to people. Of course, if I reach out to people, get also ghosted many times, but it just happens.
Travis Holland (19:30)
You said you don’t like to do the same thing twice, but there are certainly some themes there. There are the black and white drawings, I guess. But then there are some which have, you know, splashes of color and use the silhouettes with bright colors around them. Do you think for yourself, is there any…
particular group of creatures that you like to return to that you want to engage with again or that you want to really deeply come to know through art.
Karim (20:00)
This is process. This is currently a process to really say, okay, do I want to come back to an animal? Because usually I spend quite some time to read papers to a specific animal to get at least the basics right. And then most of the time I kind of done with it because there are so many different animals and new publications like every week. So there’s always
something new to explore.
Sometimes I also use the same animal in different styles just to see how it looks like because I already have some knowledge about the animal and the basic proportions so I just try out different styles. But the style evolves, like usually I have some…
phases like a couple of months so the the works you mentioned with the colorful splashes and stuff was like two to three months where I said okay it’s I really like to do it I would like to try it out I also went to some dinosaur park was drawing there because this is a style you can really do everywhere different than having your canvas and the brush you cannot do it every place
And also how I evolve styles, it’s really random. So when I get bored of something, which happens sometimes, I just take everything out what I have, like it’s different kind of colors, paintings, brushes, and try things out until a new style appears. And I find it appealing and then I work it out. And also the…
extinction pieces like beside the pangolin there’s also one piece i really like which is a shark i don’t know if you’ve you’ve seen it
There’s always a moment an artist needs to get the artwork out. So this is a piece. This is a lemon shark, actually, and the title is just One More Cut. So it has like some, it has some cuts and it’s also a reference to the re-endangered lemon shark which is hunted for fish soup and stuff.
Travis Holland (21:38)
nice. Yo.
Karim (21:54)
And I really like the style, but I didn’t want to get back to that kind of animal. currently I’m doing a similar style on a mosasaur. ⁓ So this is also what happens sometimes. I like the style and try to make different animals in the same style and have some kind of series, but it takes forever because there is, I don’t know if it applies to many artists.
Travis Holland (22:03)
Mm-hmm.
Karim (22:16)
but there’s the same like beginner’s luck, so I try it out and the first piece is really, I really like it a lot and from my perspective it went out like amazing and then I try to do the same thing again and it never works.
Travis Holland (22:30)
Yeah. Sometimes you can’t recreate the magic. You do have a series of these black and white drawn pieces where you have both the skull of a creature and its kind of living form next to each other. So that, I guess, reminds me of the Pangolin and maybe you’re calling that an extinction series. What motivates the…
Karim (22:33)
you
Yes.
Travis Holland (22:53)
juxtaposition of those two, you know, the bones with the living creature.
Karim (22:58)
So basically the bounds is everything we have for reconstruction. when we are really lucky, we have a complete skull. Most of the time it’s not the case. But it’s more like what we have and what we can make out of it. So you have the skull usually in the foreground. This is…
any kind of skull reconstruction I find in scientific papers. So there is not a lot effort into getting the shapes right because they already exist. And in the background, you have really the work and the challenge to reconstruct an animal from like with your own perspective, with your own knowledge. And it changes all the time, but this is
what I really like to do to see, this is how I imagine this animal might have looked like based on the information we already have. And for the extinction series, it’s also a reminder what we already have lost at some point. So even like people are aware that we are losing animals and maybe I can do the same stuff for like, as I mentioned, elephants, tigers, polar bears.
But I also like to remind people that we lost already so many amazing animals, which are also different than in the movies and also some recent movies are not monsters, but they are really caring animals like cats, dogs, birds with some kind of facial expression.
with emotions and stuff. this is what I would like to show.
Travis Holland (24:26)
Where do you see the intersection of technology and paleo art heading? guess you’ve found a kind of interesting niche here with the online virtual paleo art gallery. Is that something that you might expect to see more of or do we think it’s going to remain a real niche? Is it something we can look forward to? Are there anything exciting happening in that field?
at the intersection of those two areas.
Karim (24:50)
In general, I would love to see virtual galleries more often, also from real, like from bigger institutions, just to make it accessible for people who cannot go to a gallery. Or to do it with virtual reality or augmented reality to just have the opportunity to look at some things they could not explore otherwise.
it is still nothing compared to the real experience. So I really created it to connect people across the world and across the oceans and borders and stuff. And it really helps to get new inspiration and new perspectives.
Yeah, but it’s sometimes just too expensive to, for example, go to the National History Museum in America ⁓ to work, like to see specific pieces. So I would wish for more virtual galleries to pop up basically. ⁓ And if there is a chance to go there by your own, see it in real life, just do it. Online gallery is not the same, like it never will be, but it helps to…
Travis Holland (25:39)
Yeah.
Karim (25:51)
connect people and get them more close to art and that kind of stuff.
Travis Holland (25:56)
I guess it offers some new opportunities for curatorial approaches as well that you couldn’t ever do because you can put pieces in conversation with each other that might not otherwise ever be in the same physical space.
Karim (26:07)
That’s also one valid point when usually when you have galleries you have really selected artwork like high profile artists. It’s also what I try to approach to say I don’t care about your background and if you do it for a living or not we will just combine it and just get to know each other.
because this also does not happen on a regular basis.
Travis Holland (26:33)
Yeah, so again, I think you’re doing a really interesting piece of work there in lifting people up and connecting people and, you know, just getting their names out there as well and building this little community. As you’re thinking about, are you thinking about expansion and talks? I know, you know, it is a lot of work, but what’s next for you in this kind of space?
Karim (26:52)
I tend to overdo it a bit. So because I just started with one gallery and then I thought, okay, maybe I can just do networking. And then I established special exhibitions because usual networking is not enough. So I did the special exhibitions to really have like a gallery have some
temporary exhibition about a specific topic or theme. And this year were so many paleo art book releases that I thought, okay, I have to do it. You can showcase all the books really well with some images, paintings, whatever. So I tried to expand that a bit. So I have still some things in the pipeline.
with some future book releases which are happening end of this year and beginning of next year. So I try to continue the journey of these special exhibitions besides the networking. Maybe the one or other talk or workshop if that makes sense. I also need to try out what really makes sense. Maybe fail a couple of times and never do it again. Let’s see.
where it goes. So I’m also thinking, of course, doing some bigger networking events online. I use, like you saw, I use this more interactive maps. So just for the talks and networking session, I don’t really need the maps necessarily. But of course, you can use them with the 2D avatar and playful interaction to really make bigger events. So I’m thinking about some
some of these maybe a couple of hours events with multiple talks and stuff. But it’s, yeah, it’s a lot of effort. it’s just some brainstorming and this morning moment.
Travis Holland (28:34)
Yeah.
Those platforms really give you a different sense of, I guess, space, you know, rather than just clicking around the 2D space of a website, you get to control the little avatars and run around and meet people and that kind of stuff as well. So yeah, they, you know, they bring something to it. ⁓
Karim (28:52)
Yeah, I guess so far people enjoy it. So they just get into the space without expectations and then they create a small avatar. And then I get the first messages. It’s already fun, although nothing happened. So we didn’t start to talk or anything. So I just enjoy running around, interact with the objects, view the gallery already inside the platform. So I just try to extend that at some point, maybe next year.
Travis Holland (29:19)
If people want to get involved and find out more about your paleo art galleries, what’s the best way to do it?
Karim (29:25)
The easiest way is stay up to date on my website or my newsletter so I try to don’t spam people but send like important information about the next rotations, special exhibitions and talks or just send a message on Instagram or blue sky so I’m really responsive
Travis Holland (29:44)
Karim. Thank you so much.
Karim (29:45)
Yeah, thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it.
Travis Holland (29:49)
So I hope you enjoyed that interview with Karim. Go and check out his work with the Extinct Fine Art website and the Paleo Art Gallery and make sure you join up for those sessions next time one comes along. We also have some fun stuff to talk about today, Alyssa. Museum heists. And this started by… What was that? Heists. I’m excited for heists.
Alyssa Fjeld (30:07)
Thanks.
Heists. I’m just excited.
Travis Holland (30:15)
think this topic came up because we started to think about what would be the best way, hypothetically, of course, to rob certain museums and steal high profile specimens. And then we thought, yeah, let’s have a look at these heists. We’re going to tell you about four heists that you might not have heard about
Alyssa Fjeld (30:25)
Please, don’t let me in your collections, please. Please.
Travis Holland (30:36)
So the first one I’m going to talk about is this absolutely wild story of a pest controller who had a contract at the Australian Museum, which is Australia’s oldest museum in Sydney. It’s a fantastic spot.
So this pest controller, Hendrikus van Leeuwen has an obsession with taxidermy. And he had dead animals or taxidermied animals around his house, which his kids called the dead pets. So they had this collection of taxidermy animals in their house. He got this job at the Australian Museum, but he felt like the specimens were being neglected.
that they weren’t being stored very well. And there’s a quote in the article about this where he said, you can’t store stuffed animals in a building full of pigeons. across a period from 97 to 2002, Hendrikus van Leeuwen stole specimens. He took like lions. He took big specimens. He took massive animals in the museum’s own Land Cruiser over this period of five years. The value are
disappeared was about a million bucks during this period before anyone worked out what was going on. But some people started to realize that some of this had occurred and they referred it to the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption, which ran this investigation. And eventually he was charged with 15 thefts and given a seven-year sentence for which he served five years of that sentence.
A lot of these specimens were never recovered or they were badly damaged. So the museum claims that they were actually damaged during this, which is a horrific thing, but he still is pretty, I want to say he’s sort of careful or he’s quite strident in claiming that he was actually doing the right thing in a way. He was looking after the specimens. So Hendrikus has actually gone on to try and open his own museum called the Museum of Comparative Zoology Australia.
He was planning to open that in Portland in the central west, which is just down the road from me. It’s not open as we speak. And this is a couple of years on from when this became a story. And he says that all of this is legitimate, that they all come from zoo specimens, that the Australian Museum got it all back, even though they claim they never recovered some specimens. But online, you can see the Museum of Comparative Zoology Australia, Hendrikus’ venture now. But yeah.
Imagine just walking out of the Australian museum with all of these taxidermied specimens of lions and various other creatures. What a theft. What a heist.
Alyssa Fjeld (33:00)
You know, the other day I saw a flatbed trailer truck on the highway carrying a very poorly taxidermied lion and I think, you know, his spirit’s still here with us. The taxidermy thief, of course.
Travis Holland (33:11)
The lion spirit, or Hendrikus
Yeah, the taxidermy thief. So it’s interesting that, you know, to say I’m now going to open my own museum because I’m just kind of obsessed with these animals. But this is like obsession gone wrong, right? I can buy that this guy really loves the specimens, that he loves animals.
that he loves taxidermied animals in particular, and he’s quite passionate about them, but there’s a right and a wrong way to go about that. And just taking stuff out of the public collections is not the right way to do it.
Alyssa Fjeld (33:43)
Yeah, classic case of scientific objective. Let’s store this specimen for research and study versus the very human crow instinct of shiny, take it. speaking of people who ⁓ were leaning a little bit more towards the eccentric side of things, we have our next case. This is the tale of the butterfly bandit.
Meet our charming criminal Colin Wyatt, a man of many talents because this takes place in the like 1940s when you could be multiple things all at the same time. he was a… Right, exactly. You there’s, you’re an accountant or you’re, you know, a podcast host. But Colin was an Olympic ski jumper, a yodeler.
Travis Holland (34:14)
Yeah, nowadays everyone’s pushed into a single box.
Alyssa Fjeld (34:28)
a painter that’ll be relevant later, and an absolute rogue who arrived in Australia in 1942 with his wife, Mary. Aw. Unfortunately, he was very captivated by some of the butterflies in a museum collection in Adelaide. He used his charisma and the excuse of doing research for a butterfly book.
to get backstage access to all of these rare specimens inside the museum in 1946. So had a great reason to be in there. However, what he was really doing behind the scenes was taking the butterflies from the museum’s collection and pilfering them into his own. He simply strolled out with the butterflies in his pockets and even under his hat.
So his hat must have been very tall and conspicuously shaped, I suppose?
Travis Holland (35:11)
Yeah.
I guess everyone had those bowler hats in that period. Put a little tin of butterflies. Butterflies are much easier to get out than the taxidermied lion we were talking about before. Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (35:20)
True.
That would be a much more strangely shaped hat,
He’s giving the how do you do to a couple of butterflies. And he even locked himself inside one of the museums in Adelaide overnight. In total, nicking over 3,000 butterfly specimens.
Everything started to go wrong when he tried to post the stolen collection home to England. He dumped his wife and then got caught by Scotland Yard. He only got a $100 fine because the judge felt so sorry about his divorce. So imagine, imagine just being this guy for a minute. Is that a victory? Is that?
are you feeling in that moment, having just been caught stealing all of these rare butterflies and the judge going, woof buddy, that looks rough. I think you’ve suffered enough.
Travis Holland (36:10)
Yeah,
that’s basically what happened, right? That he was eventually caught and convicted in the UK rather than here in Australia. yeah, he just got this fine and this kind of slap on the wrist and the judge said, well, basically you were under a lot of stress. you know, we can, I think the judge even referred to it as a crime of passion. Stealing butterflies.
Alyssa Fjeld (36:29)
You ever just take the separation so hard that you steal a bunch of butterflies? She’s not giving you any anymore, you gotta get them from somewhere else.
So you fast forward to 2019 and Australian National University scientist Michael Braby spots dodgy red paint on a rare flame hair streak butterfly photo and thinks, hang on a second.
Remember what we said about Mr. Colin and his fantastic painting skills? Wyatt had painted a fake specimen to replace the stolen original. He switched labels, he forged locations. It was Australia’s greatest taxonomic fraud hiding in plain sight. So, you know, how did it go unnoticed for so long?
Why butterflies? There’s a lot of interesting questions to think about when we’re contemplating this murder, but I will not murder. Sorry. I listened to too many podcasts. my favorite dead dinosaur. ⁓
Travis Holland (37:20)
That’s a different podcast, yeah.
You
Alyssa Fjeld (37:28)
Well, why it matters is that these aren’t just, ⁓ you know, dead insects, they’re holotypical specimens. So they’re the specimens that scientists use as a reference when making determinations about other butterflies, seeing whether or not something is the same species. Well, you kind of need like an example that’s really definitive of that species to compare it to. Holotypes are incredibly important to us. If you’ve zoned out because I was talking about bugs and not dinosaurs, we could think about the spinosaurus specimen, the holotype that was
was
lost in Germany during the World War. So when we lose holotypes, it’s like we’ve lost a really foundational piece of biodiversity science. Species determinations are already hard enough to make. Please don’t give the bug scientists more jobs to do.
we’re already struggling so much as researchers to keep up with the naming of new species, even as climate change and increasing human industrialization and globalization threatens them. even as we’re losing the species that we’ve yet to name, having stuff disappear out of collections or get altered makes determining what we have left so much harder. you know, we can’t really afford dodgy data when every specimen counts.
Travis Holland (38:34)
Absolutely. So the story I have is from 2014 and this is actually outside a museum and it’s in Utah. So somebody turned up, cut a set of dinosaur footprints believed to be about 190 million years old out of the ground and took them away. And the people didn’t know where they went. So a tour guide turned up to, you know, do a tour and noticed this.
sandstone block had been cut out ⁓ of this trail in Utah, Hell’s Revenge Trail in Moab, according to the Bureau of Land Management, and the prints were just gone. So it had already been sort of starting to separate naturally, but then somebody found a way to break it up and put it in a truck and haul it away. But what’s really extraordinary about this particular case with these 190 million year old fossils just gone is it
Alyssa Fjeld (39:02)
Just yoinked.
Travis Holland (39:24)
points to the way these markets are now operating, right? So you’re getting these really expensive specimens like Sue, the T-Rex that sold for $8.36 million in 1997. And that was the point at which museums started to be priced out by collectors, by people who just want dinosaur fossils of all kinds. when museums can’t afford to pay these prices to collectors and private fossil operators,
Then yeah, people, we start to lose the specimens to science. I’ll give another example here. There was a Florida man, Eric Procopi, who Florida man, exactly, who smuggled a 70 million year old Mongolian Tarbosaurus Bataar valued at 15,000, but was headed from $1 million auction before the feds intervene. So it’s
Alyssa Fjeld (40:01)
Of course he’s the Florida man.
Travis Holland (40:16)
It’s a real problem because in the US, you are allowed commercial sales from private land, but not from public land. And so it’s really difficult sometimes to know where fossils come from. And so in the case of this one in Utah, with this really lucrative black market operating online, it’s easy to say, ⁓ you know, I got them from private lands and fool buyers as you sell it on.
Bureau of Land Management at the time the articles were written in 2014 had no leads in the investigation, but they pointed out that anyone who’s caught stealing these kind of artifacts face a fine and jail time of up to five years for stealing, stealing fossils. But yeah, not even out of a museum to conduct a fossil heist. Sometimes stealing from public is enough.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:59)
It’s like, for those of you who are listening outside the US, the US has an ongoing, like this is an ongoing sort of conflict between researchers, landowners and the Bureau of Land Management that has just always been part of how we protect fossils. And it’s a huge discussion. Support of things like private fossil sales in the US is much more frowned upon by researchers. And I think this is a perfectly like this is a perfect example of the kinds
of ways in which this can become super contentious. You know, a lot of the time the US parks borders do not perfectly encapsulate the kind of fossil formations or fossil bearing locations in their entirety. So there’s always a portion of land that is outside of public management that is part of the same formation. And, you know, in Florissant where I worked, you would have people selling the fossils that were protected by the park.
just down the road just outside the jurisdiction of the park so it becomes like what do do how do you work with these people and money is just unavoidable in those situations as a motivator
Travis Holland (42:02)
Yeah, it’s not a good situation when, you know, the single skeleton that you might sell costs the same as a house. And then everybody wants to just pilfer them from public spaces. So every hiking trail becomes a prehistoric crime scene.
Alyssa Fjeld (42:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you know, when a T-Rex skull cell could, you know, pay your hospital bills, that’s kind of a big question for people to be asking themselves. Our next case takes place in a slightly different location. We’re moving to, back to Australia, and we’re going to be talking about the Newcastle Psittacosaurus
So our story starts with a 110 million year old Psittacosaurusu sinensis skeleton. So we’re talking about a dinosaur that’s kind of, we talked about it a couple episodes ago. I believe I had you spell the name of this one. It’s uncomfortably spelled, but it’s, and it’s a funny looking dinosaur as well. It’s got a little parrot beak. It’s about the size of a dog, but it’s kind of round and turkey shaped.
Travis Holland (42:49)
You did, yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:03)
we’ve got some incredible intact specimens of Psittacosaurusu that have told us all kinds of useful information about dinosaur soft tissue. So you might remember, I love talking about this, but Psittacosaurusu is one of the only animals, one of the only dinosaurs, excuse me, that has enough intact fossil information for us to know about its skin, the pigmentation of its skin, and most importantly, its cloaca.
We’re talking about a specimen that had made it to the Newcastle Regional Museum. So Newcastle is a location just north of Sydney and it is how would you describe Newcastle? It’s a bit smaller than Sydney but it’s not small small.
Travis Holland (43:39)
Yeah,
in New South Wales, it’s one of the three largest cities here. So you’ve got Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. It’s a kind of post-industrial city that’s been undergoing a bit of a revival in the last 20 years or so. at 2003, the Newcastle museum, well, sorry, the city of Newcastle was sort of under an economic cloud, I would say. So it was struggling a bit with the shift from heavy industry manufacturing and those kinds of things. And particularly.
carbon intensive industries like steel were starting to close down or move on or, you know, shared a lot of jobs at the time. So the city was struggling in 2003.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:15)
Yeah, like a lot of small struggling cities, they were looking to protect some of the institutions like their regional museum. As someone from Chattanooga, we’re talking about a location that has a very similar history of being highly industrial for most of its history and trying to kind of pivot to this. We have museums, please come visit our town for touristy reasons. So I really empathize with where the town might have been at this time in 2003.
But in 2003, the museum was subject to a heist. Thieves smashed the security glass to nick a turkey-sized prehistoric treasure on loan from China. So the museum did not own this psittacosaurus It was on loan to them from one of the museums that it normally lived at.
And you might be asking, besides the broken glass, how did they know that these masterful thieves had been there? And that’s because they left bones scattered around the museum, like breadcrumbs. So you can imagine the destruction left by a dog on the tear for a midnight snack. That’s kind of the scene I’m envisioning here.
Travis Holland (45:10)
Yeah.
Pretty much, you know, was a smash and grab situation. They went in really quickly and got out really quickly, but they left some bones in and around the museum.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:28)
It’s funny because this specimen on its own, right? This isn’t like a T-Rex, it’s not a Stegosaurus, it’s a dinosaur that dinosaur nerds care about, but isn’t well known to the public. And as a result of both that and the lack of demand, this is a specimen that was probably only worth tens of thousands in terms of just raw monetary costs, but.
Like I was just saying, these specimens at the time were so rare and so important to us and so priceless for the science. And it just kind of becomes apparent in the way that this thing was taken that it wasn’t, you know, exactly being pinched by somebody who knew how to take care of something so rare and precious, scattering bones around the museum. So how did the museum handle it?
Initially they offered $5,000 for a reward because the thing is like incredibly distinctive. It’d be like trying to sell off the Mona Lisa to a secondary buyer. There’s no way that people who know what they’re talking about in this case are going to not know immediately that this is the thing that just got stolen from the regional museum.
And I think it’s also very interesting because it was part of this larger really captivating display showing how dinosaurs had evolved into birds. not only were they kind of stealing this important piece of evolutionary history, but they were disrupting what could have otherwise been a really important display that could, you know, offer something really priceless to people in this regional area, like a piece of life history that they didn’t know anything about before. And now something
that gave us a clue and an insight into that is just gone.
Travis Holland (47:02)
It’s pretty, yeah, destroying the fossil in the process of stealing it means that anyone they tried to sell it to, you know, wouldn’t be receiving a high quality fossil anyway. So it’s not like they’ve actually made the money that they thought. So it sounds pretty opportunistic really.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:18)
Yeah, it feels like they gave into one of those intrusive thoughts, like the people that you see being shamed online for like sitting on priceless chairs in museums and things like that. It was a crime of opportunity that I hope the person who did it has since sobered up from and deeply regrets.
Travis Holland (47:37)
Yeah,
unfortunately though it was never found as far as I can tell. Nothing online points to this fossil ever being recovered, which is pretty unfortunate.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:46)
person who nicked it again ⁓ comes forward at some point and gives the museum’s back their specimen if for no other reason then you know regardless of how we feel about your actions it’s an important specimen and we would like it back please thank you
Travis Holland (48:00)
So I hope you’ve enjoyed that little detour into museum heists around the world. I’d love to know what would you heist from a museum? How would you heist?
Alyssa Fjeld (48:09)
How would you heist? Give us the details. Heist! My friends are always saying
that I’d be good on a heist, so I’m- I- someday, you know, watch out.
Travis Holland (48:19)
think it’d be a bit loud though.
Alyssa Fjeld (48:20)
I think I can fit in the air vents. I think that’s the usefulness of my abilities.
Travis Holland (48:24)
Okay.
Okay, so if you are a museum curator and you ever hear a redhead with a… What’s your accent? Tennessee accent?
Alyssa Fjeld (48:35)
⁓ if you, if you
hear a very loud and distinctive guffaw in your air events after you’ve left me alone in the collection, no, you didn’t. That’s not real. You can ignore that.
Travis Holland (48:47)
Thanks to Karim for coming on this episode and having a chat about his ⁓ community building work, the Virtual Paleo Art Gallery and more. Make sure you check out his website and we’ll also put links so you can read a bit more about some of those fossil heists in the show notes. Thanks Alyssa
Alyssa Fjeld (49:05)
Thank you, Travis. See you guys in the next one.
