EP 90 Art, paleontology and dad jokes with Ray Troll

I like to do artwork that grabs your attention and i think that's what it all kind of kind of comes down to is attention and but with that sometimes it's just a joke but i also like to, draw you in and maybe there's a deeper connection there there's something deeper about the art and i think you know if you look at my art i hope that you see that there's something deeper there it's not it's not just uh you know skin deep it's some of it is i hope deeply resonant but

you know this slides by a lot of people so, spawn do you die spawn do you die for instance is kind of a dumb joke but you know in a way.

It's deeper because it speaks to our biological connection to the world we are in the same quest as our other creatures on this planet you know love and death love and death love and death, that was ray troll he's an artist and he describes himself as a paleo nerd, ever since he was a kid he's been obsessed with dinosaurs in fact before he even learned how to spell his own name he learned how to spell dinosaur they were also the first things he remembers drawing he

says that as a child drawing was his superpower it endeared him to his teachers and his classmates. Then, around fifth grade, he got a hold of issues of Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine. He was immediately drawn to the offbeat dark humor, so much so that it was forever infused into his artistic style and sensibilities. It's evident in one-liners, like Spawn Till You Die, Return of the Sockeye, and Bateful Dead, that accompany illustrations of humans and sea life.

He says that he loves surrealism because it's something you can't really explain rationally. It's bizarre, almost dreamlike, and it speaks to you on a gut level. It might be visually appealing, it might convey a message, or it might be a joke. Much of Ray's art comes from a place of humor, but a lot of truth can be said in jest. Musings on deep time and nature and culture, all wrapped up in a dad joke. For him, art is about learning and cataloging.

With planes when he was a kid, he was an army brat who lived in 10 different places throughout his childhood. And later with fish after he moved to Alaska in 1983. He says that drawing is about learning to see. It's about the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom that you gain throughout your life. So here he is, Ray Troll.

Welcome to Chatter Marks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska and the Circumpolar North through the creative and critical thinking of ideas, past, present, and future. Music. My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host.

Tell me about ratfish vodka. Well, is that the, are we on? Are we going? This is it. Well, this is it. Ratfish vodka. Well, let's see. Well, it all starts with the ratfish. I got to thank the ratfish.

It's kind of, well, I could take a half hour and talk just about ratfish, but, uh ratfish are very unusual fish they're in the shark family they're really ancient they're just weird bizarre looking things always when i moved to alaska 42 years ago i wanted to catch one so i'm in the fish books yeah anyways to cut to what is ratfish vodka there is a a fish and chip shop in Ketchikan, Alaska, where once upon a time, one of the charter guys there that operate out of,

there's a charter fishing group that also operates out of that fish and chip place. They caught a ratfish. They thought it was so weird and ugly, as do I, but they thought that maybe they should put it into a big vat of vodka and dare people to take shots of vodka out of this thing. And actually, so... And this has been several years, and so my son started doing a video, a whole film, a documentary on what dad is doing and all that.

And I had heard about this legendary ratfish vodka and sitting over at the fish and chip shop. And so live and on camera, we marched in there, and we tried a shot of it. And we dared each other to do it, but actually it was a dare that I threw down because we were trying to catch a ratfish off the dock. And if we didn't catch a ratfish off the dock, I said I would go take a drink of that. So anyways, that's a heck of a way to start a whole interview, man. Just cutting right to it.

Yeah. And you're even in a band called the Ratfish Wranglers. Yes, I am in a band. I'm actually wearing the t-shirt, which you could see over the microphone here, but we don't have video. But I'm wearing one of the Ratfish Wranglers shirts. Yeah, the ratfish thing, maybe you want me to explain a little bit of the ratfish thing? Yeah, let's do it.

So my story is that I arrived in Alaska in 1983 with two art degrees in my back pocket, a master of fine earth degree from Washington State University. I got that in 81, but also got my bachelor's degree in printmaking and drawing here in Lindsborg, Kansas, where I currently am sitting right now. But anyways, I arrived in Ketchikan in 83 because my big sister had a seafood shop up there that she was opening. And I was kind of between things, you know, got my master's degree.

I actually taught back here in Kansas for a year. But then, you know, I was up for an adventure. Okay. And three of my five siblings already lived in Alaska, and Kate, my big sister. Invited me up, and I was a fishmonger on the dock in Ketchikan, and so I fell in love with fish. Fish became my muse. What's going to happen to a guy that's got a couple of art degrees? I wasn't really the best fish salesman, but I was an artist,

but I blended the two. Anyways, started drawing and painting fish, tumbled way deep into the fish culture. Fish became my muse, and I became kind of a de facto expert, just kept drilling down on these things. But also, I saw this very bizarre-looking fish in the ID books that was from Alaska, and I thought, hmm, I want to catch one of those someday.

And I liked it because it appealed to me because it was just this kind of weird looking, you know, kind of obnoxious looking, but I would dare you say it, but it also sounded a lot like Rat Fink. You know, I'd grown up with Rat Fink and- Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. And Daddy Roth, you know, Rat Fink. Yeah. And- Anyways, one day, lo and behold, I did catch one. It looked like a creature

from outer space. It didn't look like anything like the other fish, the beautiful salmon and halibut that I had been catching the lingcod. This was this bizarre thing. I wanted to know more about it. And because I'm a science geek to curious, naturally curious, I reached out to a ratfish scientist. There's not too many of them in the world. But back in the day, you know, you could cold call people that called the de facto expert on it, Dominique Didier, back in Pennsylvania.

She was excited to hear from me. And I learned that they really are ancient survivors. They're really prehistoric fish. And I think, in a way, that's why they appealed to me, because they really are like from another world, you know, a previous world. And actually, most of the fish, and here I'm geeking out on you, most of the fish that we catch in the ocean and up in Alaska are from after the asteroid hits 66 million years ago.

Okay. So, there's a huge radiation, as the biologists say, lots and lots of species. When the oceans and basically the world is reset 66 million years ago, lots of things. You know, when you have an extinction event, there's a lot of empty spaces and empty niches in nature. And the marine reptiles were gone. The big plesiosaurs, the big mosasaurs are gone. Only the sea turtles made it through. But stuff, the ammonites are now out of the way. And ammonites filled the oceans.

Fish really begin to diversify at that point so they they kind of explode in the ocean so we have all these species of fish today but this the humble little ratfish lived through not only that extinction but they lived through a previous extinction uh and the biggest extinction of all the permian triassic 250 million years ago so anyways they're from this ancient world and maybe that's more than you really ever wanted to know about ratfish i'm sorry no no

no that's great because my next question is uh related to your favorite shark that is extinct and you have to help me out with the name here i think i know of what you speak.

Helicoprion, helicoprion. Some people say helicoprion. The French say helicoprion. But helicoprion, but yeah. It is a prehistoric member of that ratfish family, that ratfish group. And just to further geek out on you, ratfish are also known as chimeras. And a chimera is a creature that looks like many creatures put together in Greek mythology. But they're also called chimeras. And they're also called ghost sharks.

Because they are in the shark group. They have skeletons made of cartilage, cartilaginous fish. So they're in the shark group. They're over on that side of the big fish tree. And so sharks and bony fish split almost 400 million years ago. But within the sharks, there is this group of creatures called the chimeras and the ghost sharks. So they split with the sharks probably about 350 million years ago. And this is, I'm trying to keep track of all the numbers here.

But they are um so they're in the shark family so when you catch a ratfish it doesn't look anything like a shark but yeah we know it's in that group because it has a cartilagous skeleton. So hadlecoprion just to get back to that yeah um because i'm a lifelong paleo geek and was working on a book and i think it was the fall of 1992 or 93 i saw a beautiful fossil, in the basement of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and it's a huge, well, it's two and a half feet across.

Okay. A spiral of teeth. And it looked like an ammonite and I was like, what's an ammonite doing in this vertebrate collection here? I was with the paleontologist at the time and he said, well, Those are actually shark teeth. It's a big spiral of shark teeth, and nobody's ever figured that one out. Paleontologists have known about it for over 100 years. They were first discovered in 1899 in Russia. Okay. And even then it puzzled people, and there's still a lot of debate about it.

So I became obsessed at that point. And it's like, I'm going to figure this out.

So I could use an expletive if I want to. Yeah, go ahead. You can use an expletive, yeah. Well, it was just fucking weird, all right? So, there I said it. It was just freaking weird. Yeah. So, what is this thing? And I began to just follow my curiosity once again. And now that, you know, I was working at books, and so that kind of gives you a pass in a way to just call people. I'm working on a book. Sure, yeah, yeah. I'm doing research, but I'm an artist. But I'm doing research.

Yeah. So I'm already blending science and art, but I found out that once again, just like with Dominique being one of the few ratfish researchers in the world, there was very few paleozoic shark people working in the world. And the paleontologist I was with at the time said, you got to consult with this guy. He's one of the only guys in the United States. Call him up, Reiner's Angerl. He'll tell you all about the weird spiral of teeth.

Called him up. He was in Indiana at the time in his late 80s and retired from the Field Museum. And he schooled me on what teeth are all about. And I learned a lot from Reiner. And just talking over the phone, I finally went out to go meet with him. And it turns out that that big spiral of teeth, they're in that ratfish family. They're not true sharks. They're ghost sharks, but they're still on that side of the tree.

It's a as you may know sharks produce thousands of teeth in their lifetime yeah it's a conveyor bill. And every time they bite something, or even as they're cruising along, they lose teeth. The conveyor belt is producing more. But what, if you look closely at the teeth, as the shark is growing bigger, it's getting, it's growing bigger teeth. The teeth come in fully formed. Okay. Okay. So if they don't shed those teeth, and they retain those teeth, it would just start a spiral.

Okay. But they're shedding these, but they have rows and rows of teeth. Now, Helicoprion and a related group of sharks is now completely extinct, had teeth only in the middle of their jaws. Okay. Only in the middle and aligned kind of straight up with their nose there. So, they're just spiraling in that direction. And these are blades that are now on their side, just kind of coming straight out of the shark. So it turns out that Helicoprion is producing this tooth factory,

but it's cheating the tooth fairy. It is keeping its teeth. Okay. So anyways, I got obsessed with it 20 years into it. You know, Reiner taught me about it, but that spiral of teeth is only in the lower jaw. In the upper jaw, they got these flat teeth and it cuts like a cutting board, like an ulu knife against a cutting board. And so it chops its prey too, and they're serrated.

Mm-hmm. Then in 2013, in 2012, there was a group of scientists that I helped to assemble because of my just obsession with this. And it's kind of a longer story, but a group of scientists that was led by Leif Tapanella and his student Jesse Pruitt at Idaho State University in Pocatello, where all the best helicoprine fossils in the world are. Okay. Anyways, got a team together led by Leif. I help gather that team up.

Participated in all the discussions about it and lo and behold uh we did determine by ct scanning one of the best fossil specimens in the world so it turns out that in these fossils of these worlds if you carefully look at it there's cartilage in there and the the entire jaw and the upper jaw were in this one fossil wow and the ct scan showed that jesse pruitt was able to tease it out with 3D imaging. And so that new technology solved that mystery once and for all that started in 1899.

And really, you know, I got to say it was my obsession with it and others, you know, that I tell about it and I just kept the spirit going.

And so 2013, the paper came out and now, and when, if you were able to operate a Google machine back in the 1980s and 1990s you would have seen only my stuff so i was one of the first ones to draw it uh correctly and uh now the world has got lots and lots of those and that's awesome yeah so anyways yeah now there's the spike tooth salmon did you read about that one the spike tooth salmon yeah this is alaskan podcast right so yeah yeah tell me about it.

Well once again it's kind of a 20 year obsession thing um 20 plus years maybe 30 years in that one, um when i started tumbling way deep into the science of fish and fish became my muse and i'm drawing and painting and of course if you're doing fish art in alaska i do a lot of salmon art and uh my latest book spawned you die the fin artery troll there's like, Oh, 40 or 50 pages just of salmon art.

But I, as I began to borrow specimens of fish to draw from, from the University of Washington, one of the scientists down there told me, said, hey, have you ever heard about this saber tooth salmon? And I was like, what? That sounds like too good to be true. And it's a giant, yeah, it's a giant fish, a giant saber tooth salmon.

So my brain just kind of explodes once again oh my god that is so freaking cool, and so i tracked down the the scientific paper on it um and lo and behold it had been dubbed the saber-toothed salmon because it's got these huge teeth in its snout but it turns out that the and so i started drawing it and then i got contacted other researchers began to find And go to museum collections and go back in the back rooms and find specimens of these and vertebrae the size of marlin.

Contacted other scientists, a scientist by the name of Jerry Smith, the University of Michigan, paleo-ichthyologist specializing in North American freshwater fish. Worked with Jerry and getting some size estimates on it, you know, and that was, came up with 8 feet, 400 pounds.

Wow. a conservative estimate at first jerry and i were well jerry was dialing it about 10 feet which i think is still a possibility but it turns out the very first skull of that that was found and the paper that was published on it by cavender and sterny i think in uh the early 70s i don't know exactly when that paper came out off the top of my head but the first specimen ever found the big saber teeth were not attached to the skull, they were found near it.

Well, about 10 years ago, a whole new batch of these perfectly preserved skulls were found in eastern Oregon near the town of Gateway, Oregon. And a bunch of paleontologists and a bunch of volunteer paleo geeks, the NARG group, went out, dug up these perfectly preserved Onchorhynchus rastrosus skulls.

And it turns out that those big teeth were actually pointing exactly sideways and they were big conical cone shaped things but very sharp and much more like a spike and they point sideways and every single one of these the males and the females because it looks like it was a spawning bed and actually males and females just like side by side and they died in love and there they were okay so it's like wait a minute you know sabers are these like a blade and uh stabbing sort of thing and

uh because i'd been obsessed with this creature and they found these new fossils uh ed davis and karen clason and brian sudoloskis were the chief authors the scientists who started working in this i was invited to be part of the discussions and i'm actually a co-author on the paper that came out about a month ago. Okay. And trying to rename it, you know, a common name as opposed to a scientific name and calling it the spike tooth salmon because it's much more descriptive.

And what's that all about? Well, these are the sister species of sockeye salmon, which is mind-blowing too. Imagine a giant sockeye salmon, a red salmon, with spikes, 400 pounds. You wouldn't want to get near those spikes. So, they're probably defensive and also combative because they compete in the stream beds with other males and females. And also, if you're a big old bear, you'd probably think twice about getting close to one. But anyways, yeah. So, that's the spike tooth salmon. And yeah.

Do you think that you're interested in the idea of time and how things change or evolve over time? Oh yeah. I think it's very important to know about deep time and where things come from and how they're all related. Because if you don't know, you know, how things are connected or even where vertebrates come from, you don't know what you are, who you are. You don't know who you are. If you don't know that you're descended from fish, did you know that?

You're descended from fish. So really, technically, you are a fish, my friend. So that's kind of mind-blowing. And if you don't know that, you know, the closest relatives of bears are sea lions and seals and walruses, that's kind of mind-blowing. Like, wait a minute. You're going to look at seals and sea lions differently. You're going to look at bears differently. You understand these relationships, the last common ancestors.

So, a lot of mind-blowing stuff, you know. So, but to realize that all bony creatures, vertebrates with bones, all of us are variations on fish. Yeah, you say, you know, in my research, I found you saying this a few times, that we're all lobe fin descendants, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I was working on a book with Brad Manson, an author that did the Planet Ocean book. And we began to understand, go deeper into understanding evolution.

And there's this new science, a new way of looking at evolution. You know, Darwin basically figured it out, but clades, cladistics. So it's like, well, mathematical equations, but basically a branch and a tree. So if you belong on that branch, you are that branch. That branch is you. So if you look at evolution and when vertebrates start, animals with backbones, basically it's a fish. Okay. Head at one end. Two arms, which are basically their pectoral fins and two pelvic fins.

And then from there, it starts diversifying. And there's a lot of the bony fish that split off, and then the sharks split off. But then within that bony fish group, there's one little group of fish. That little group of fish, they're called the lobe-finned fish. They are the sarcopterygian lobe-finned fish. And they are bony fish. They're not the sharks. They're a group from the bony fish.

And about 375 million years ago, that group crawls up in the swamps, you know, and begins to live and begins to breathe air and begins to inhabit the land. They make the transition from the ocean to the land. And it is a new world. And that new world, that group of fish gives rise to the amphibians. And then the amphibians give rise to the reptiles.

And right before there's, you know, this is where, I mean, I'm making this very simple because there's a group that comes out of the reptiles, actually right before the reptiles that are the mammalian, mammal-like. They like to call them pre-mammalian synapsids, if you want to get technical. Okay. That group leads to the mammals, and then the mammals leads to us. With the reptiles, that leads to the plesiosaurs and crocodiles, but birds, and out of birds, out of dinosaurs come the birds.

So the birds are still, birds are dinosaurs, but all of those, all of those are fish, and the vertebrates that crawled up on the land are lobe-finned fish. Mm-hmm. So you've been drawing for your whole life, and I wonder what your art looked like as a kid. Because the art that we're all familiar with right now, Ray Troll art, I wonder what the evolution of that looked like. Well, it's kind of a steady progression of things as a kid.

The first thing i remember drawing you know maybe age four was a dinosaur dinosaurs i just love dinosaurs and i was drawing with crayons and actually before i even knew how to spell my own name i remember this i wanted to spell dinosaur so d-i-n-o-s-a-u-r oh yeah i'm by the name my name is eric um so i began to you know and drawing was kind of my childhood superpower i was just remembering kindergarten, you know, that, oh, that kid could draw.

Well, the kindergarten teacher said, well, why don't you work over here and help us do the set for the school play?

So, distinctly remember painting, and I got to get out of class to do this, see? So, I'm already parlaying my superpower. But I'm an Air Force brat, so this was actually, I grew up in Air Force bases, and we moved all the time, 10 different places. And I became enamored of airplanes next. Okay. And I began to draw airplanes, every kind of airplane. And I began to catalog them. Then I began to do battle scenes because I'm a little boy, you know, on Air Force bases.

And I remember just doing these very elaborate – well, I actually still have a bunch of these battles. But also, I was really enjoying history, and they weren't just random battle scenes. I would begin to just drill down on, you know, here I am, 10 years old. I'm going to draw the Battle of Waterloo. Okay. Oh, yes. So I go and research all the French uniforms and I'm in the library geeking out and the four nations that the English had at the Battle of Waterloo.

And then I just began to do the Battle of Tenochtitlan in the Aztecs and Austerlitz. I was in a Napoleonic phase. So anyways, one of those, but then, you know, the Vietnam war was happening and I was, uh, on an air force base in Puerto Rico and the B 52 bombers were there. And one day they were, they all turned, they camouflaged them all. They'd been silver and like suddenly they were in battle painting. Okay. And I just remember that distinctly, like this big change had happened

and they started painting the black too. And they were launching. Yeah. Some of these B-52s all the way from Puerto Rico to go around the world and basically hit targets in North Vietnam and here very impressionable. But I remember just I drew all the jets that ever flew in that war. Anyway, so I went on from cataloging that kind of stuff to when I moved to Alaska, I began to, you know, when I was in art school, I did all kinds of stuff.

But I applied that same sort of wanting to just catalog things and cramming everything I could into, you know, just learning every species I could that was in Alaska. Yeah. And going back to you being an Air Force brat, just for a second, you were interested in airplanes and being a pilot.

Yeah there was one little period there where for a while i wanted to be a jet airplane pilot because you know i was around this culture of you know jet airplanes the big bombers and then i remember when the the uh and then i did a lot of drawings of world war ii airplanes and so my father flew a b-29s uh in world war ii okay and uh i remember when the uh when the fighter, jet planes would land at the air force bases it was always a big deal to be around the top gun dudes you know um but yeah

so i aspired to that but for a little bit and i think it was maybe about a year of my life or something i was uh drawing and doing little watercolors of airplanes and uh but then soon i was back on the natural history stuff and gave up on that was it just you losing interest or was it something else um probably losing interest um you know when you're a child you put away childish things you know at some point but i put only a few of those things away my love for dinosaurs is still still ongoing

and i still dig looking at a cool airplane and all that kind of stuff but yeah i don't know maybe uh girls and rock and roll changed my. Changed my outlook yeah you know i remember in puerto rico so we lived in puerto rico that's where i was lived in the bomber base for sure 10 to 13 years old by the time i was 13 i was beginning to think about different things you know love yeah do you have a favorite airplane.

Oh man let's see an sr 71 know what that is no but why uh just looks cool you know it's just, really a lot of it is whether or not it looks cool um and what is that what is the barometer of cool it's hard to you know it's i guess i've messed with that my whole life what's cool just It's like, well, it's just sort of inner, something about it appeals to you in some sort of visceral level. But the sleek lines of an SR-71, they're a reconnaissance plane.

So it wasn't, they're high, they almost look like a spaceship if you Google one. And I think one came to the base once and it just blew my mind. It's the successor to the U-2, which was a spy plane.

Okay and these black spy planes would fly way up in the stratosphere and be undetected and kind of weirdly shaped but uh i think they're like 50 60 feet long two massive engines on them but they look like rocket ships and uh yeah they're just badass looking cool cool badass looking things and yeah yeah i'm looking at one right now and it looks like something from an avengers movie yeah it does or you know i mean uh star wars has a bit of that vibe there we go yeah that

too but you know i mean there's things about just the shape of things if you want to kind of get, uh you know dig a little bit deeper in all this stuff you know i love trilobites which are. These ancient ancient things they ruled the cambrian and ordovician seas and the paleozoic and there are tens of thousands of species of them, but they just look cool. But you know, they also look like a spaceship. Yeah, they do. If you look at them, they're just like trilobites.

I got one tattooed on my right arm. My first tattoo at age 50. Okay. Saved up all my life to get that tattoo. I got a tattoo on my right arm and actually my family chipped in. I get dad and his first tattoo. and of course I had to put flames on it because everything looks cooler with flames, man. Yeah. So I got a flame and trilobite on my right arm, but I can't, a love of ancient arthropods ain't easy to explain, but here's, you know, that's a lyric from my trilobite song.

Okay. Love of ancient arthropods ain't easy to, but I gotta say my darling, they're rolling around my brain. So there's just something, and that's what I love about surrealistic art. I love science, but I love surrealism and surrealism.

You can't really explain it rationally it just surrealistic art maybe just looks bizarre it's a dreamlike image but it speaks to you on this kind of different level and it's something that maybe you feel kind of in your gut and i look at something that just looks cool you know and it resonates with me and i'm compelled to want to draw it or to um graphomania it says you know if I draw it there's just something about drawing and I really do think Cody that drawing itself

is one of the most powerful learning tools out there and I think it's a basic skill that I hope AI doesn't take away from us that I think that kids you know when I was drawing something and when you are drawing something especially if you're looking at something looking back at the paper you're giving it the love of your attention you're sharing your your your valuable time in this planet looking carefully at something and you are drawing it and you're trying

to get it right and you're just spending time with something and like i said it's a powerful learning tool and if you're curious about what you're looking at you know you want to know more about it and And there I go, off to the library. Nowadays, it's just off to Google, you know, so. I read that your inspiration comes from extensive field work and the latest scientific discoveries. How are you keeping up on the latest scientific discoveries?

Well, the news feeds, you know, you go to the algorithm feeds it to you if you start looking at it. But also, I hang out a lot with scientists, and I guess I am kind of a scientist these days. I really do. Yeah. I hang out with ichthyologists and paleontologists and paleobotanists. And when I go to the doctor and I talk to a generalist, but also the dentist, so there's scientists all around you. But the scientific papers and now I'm participating in things.

But, you know, it's also what I think what's cool about scientists is that they're a friend, Kirk Johnson, I've done a few books with. He's at the Smithsonian now. And he says that at the Smithsonian, they have curiosity-based researchers. Okay. CBR. And I went, oh, I think that's what artists do. I'm a curiosity-based researcher. So, really, I'm always doing research with my art. You know, so I wonder if you feel like when you're drawing, are there any revelatory moments in that process?

Huh. Interesting. Um, well, yeah, really all the time. Um, it's almost like every time I sit down, I feel like I have to learn to draw again. I don't know. It's weird. Uh, so especially if you get rusty.

So there really is a kind of a thing of warmup, you know? okay so especially when i before i launch into really long drawings you know ones that i know are going to take me a few months to do so but i remember back to in teaching back when i was at a professor is that um doing kind of warm-up drawings or you see you know musicians do the same kind of thing you got to warm up and then you kind of get back in the groove but i do think um drawing is just really learning to see and of

course everybody says ah you can see you know everybody can see right but but are you really seeing you know yeah but you know if you ask someone to draw a face they could do it but chances are they'll draw symbols and not you know look at something closely so even then in the drawing class people tend to draw and especially they do this with the human figure they'll draw a symbol for an eye rather than looking at an eye they'll draw you know it's just

ingrained in us these images so you just have to learn to look carefully at things i when i'm drawing i'll get way deep into something and then i have to just walk away and have fresh eyes coming back and musicians will say they need when they're recording you know fresh ears on a song walk. Away from it you know come back. Yeah, I like that. You said that drawing is about learning how to see better. Do you feel like at this point, you can see people better, art better, life better?

Do we ever really know what time it is? What's going on, man? Well, I do think it's a matter of really paying attention to your surroundings. And when I talk about artists and drawing, learning to draw, you know, one of the things, one of the characters you see of an artist is they're holding their thumb up and measuring something, you know? You see that, you know, they got the beret on and their arm is out. They get their thumb up and they're squinting. They're measuring.

So, sometimes you really have to just analyze and just really spend the time looking at things. But, yeah, I think the accumulation of knowledge, wisdom, you grow through your lifetime. And, yeah, it's a shame that we all have to check out at some point, you know. Just when you think you figured it all out. Well, then that dementia sets in and then you're gone. Sorry. Humor is a big part of your art. I've noticed. And I think that that is probably pretty obvious.

When and maybe why did you decide to fuse your art with humor? Well, yeah. None of it was really a conscious decision, so much like I'm not going to use humor. Well, I don't know. I'm thinking back about this. You're making me think now, Cody. But I want to look back, too. I have been doing some PowerPoint talks and just showing people all my inspiration, my sources through life where I've really picked up stuff. And, you know, where does Ray Troll's imagery come from?

And a lot of people say R. Crumb when they look at my stuff, Crumb, Zap Comics. But I think a lot of it, my sensibilities to came from Mad Magazine as a kid. Okay. And that, I just loved the kind of offbeat, sort of sick humor. The dark humor, if you will, in Mad Magazine.

And rat fake as opposed to mickey mouse and sweetness i like that rat rat fake was the the un mickey mouse as horrible as you get it monsters and that kind of thing but i always loved uh mad magazine and there was cracked magazine this is the 1960s and and then as a kid in elementary school and junior high school and this is where i told you this that's right when we were emailing. So there's Mad Magazine, Crack Magazine.

And I think in fifth grade, when I was in Puerto Rico, drawing airplanes and all that, my friends and I in elementary school there on the base started doing a little magazine that we called Crud. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Crud, Crud. So we were oh so clever, but I think we figured out even how to use a mimeograph machine so that we could do copies.

So we asked the teachers if we could use an old you know the mimeograph so we could i did the little drawings and then some of my friends did uh wrote little jokes and things and we'd do comic strips and we'd make fun of of our teachers and just silly situations and stuff and yeah and then i was in junior high school i did the same thing too did sort of little comics of my, and you know, you garner favor with them. Yeah. But also, like I said, so humor was always part of it.

Um, and I was the smart ass in class, you know, always the joker and I would, I would do impressions and that kind of thing and get up in front of the class and do goofy things. And then when there was theater class, I loved theater class and, but, uh, here in Lindsborg, when I was an undergrad student here at Bethany college, uh, along came Monty Python and that just blew our minds.

And uh we were very python-esque so yeah humor is just always so yeah when i moved to, seattle in 77 and there were some artists out there and you started i started seeing whimsy in the fine art world and some humor in the fine art world and especially and some kind of like said whimsy and and um kind of goofiness too that uh especially out in eastern washington at washington state university where i got my master's degree there were painting painters like galen hansen

and linda okazaki and then uh they were the great artists galen still alive 100 years old still painting these big huge things but they're whimsical scenes that uh and kind of humorous scenes that the Galen is painting himself wrestling with giant trout, you know, like that went straight into my artistic DNA.

So, yeah. And. Then combining my interest in graphic art and being in bands and that kind of stuff to taking a phrase like a chorus in a song, I can't get no satisfaction, spawn till you die, ain't no nookie like shin nookie, out of the ooze and bored to cruise. Yeah. You know, hook, line, and thinker. They're like a chorus from a song, but taking that, doing the phrase, and combining it with an image. People paying ideas off me. One of my favorites, somebody actually mailed in an email.

God, I forget the guy's name now, but the family that prays together stays together. It's like, oh, praise, as in P-R-E-Y. Yeah, that dark humor. So, there is a bear standing on top of a backpacker and basically consuming the backpacker. And there's little cubs around it and they're eating the backpacker. You know, demented, but dark humor. Yeah, just like Mad Magazine or Cracked Magazine. Just like Mad Magazine and Cracked.

And actually, if you look at Mad Magazine too, and there was Highlights Magazine when I was a kid too, there would be these insanely detailed drawings sometimes. It's like foldouts. But also at the same time too, time-life books, my mom, they're six kids and she's getting these kind of encyclopedias for the family to have, but these time-life nature books, and those were full of these beautiful paintings, jam full of creatures, and some of them were prehistoric creatures.

And so a guy like Jay Maternis, who was actually, I found out later, he's the guy doing these incredible dioramas that were in those time-life books. And recently I had him on my podcast. So I got to meet some of my, if you look at his work. Creatures just filling everything so this love for detail and cataloging things it's you know not not enough time in my life to to do and draw them all do you remember what it felt like the first time you picked up one of those magazines mad and cracked.

My little brain exploded um i just thought it was funny as hell you know and i couldn't and there we were in puerto rico and and uh stuff had to be shipped in this is ramey air force based in puerto rico 1964 65 67 66 and 67 uh and i couldn't wait till the base px the bx as we called it the base exchange got the latest issue and uh me and my buddies would be the first ones there and we would just pass them back and forth and um yeah um super excited and i would just,

i channeled what they were doing um yeah and did them in crud magazine yeah so then like i said in junior high school i was doing that too and doing caricatures of the teachers and my fellow students, And that was in Wichita, Kansas, when I went to junior high there, so. And then when I got here to Bethany College, I was doing more serious art, you know. Yeah. Art with a capital A. But even then, I didn't know what the heck I was doing. And you're just a sponge at that point in your life.

And you're looking for your own styles. You're all, but you're always a sponge, but you begin to get your own distinctive style. Yeah. As you mature. Music.

I watched this video clip on Instagram where you say that you always wanted to be a gallery artist, but you became a t-shirt guy. What did you mean by that?

Actually that's that's in a little clip from Patrick my son Patrick's documentary that he's working on and we were just walking around, we were walking around the Pike Place Market and there was graffiti I love to look at graffiti stuff and we were just wandering down the graffiti there by the Pike Place Market and there up in the wall, was the art world hates you or something like that and I said I can relate to that but.

But yeah, the art world is, it's a great, wonderful world too, but man, it's hard to get into and it's to get to that. I was trained basically as a gal, as a studio artist, not as a commercial artist, a fine artist. So that was the fine arts degree, a nice, perfectly useless degree in the world, or is it, you know?

Because you know very few people really make it as a studio artist where you're selling your work you break through to a level where you are selling anything you do for mega thousands of dollars and you're in and i tried that route and i i've been in that round and i've done it but there was a point where it was just like. I had my printmaking degree and I knew how to do these t-shirts and stuff. So I applied my fine art training and sensibilities to making stuff like t-shirts.

So it's in there. But also simultaneously, I was still doing gallery shows. But then a big pivotal moment for me too was I was piling up all this artwork. And i was working that at the on that book the planet ocean book and this is in when i'd seen the buzzsaw shark that hello caprian and i was doing all these beautiful drawings and framing them up i'd like to think they're beautiful but they're very complex drawings framing them.

And i was thinking i was going to go to a gallery with them and i had to convince a gallery and there was this gallery scene in Seattle and they're hard to break into. I talked to a friend of mine who's actually in the business of advising artists, Claudia Bach, and she's at MyzArts and I've known her since while I moved to Seattle. But she said, you know, it's going to be hard for you to get into a gallery with all these drawings of dinosaurs and buzzsaw sharks and trilobites and things.

It just doesn't make a lot of sense really for a gallery to risk that money on you basically because they've got to pay the rent and you're probably not going to sell them. Why don't you approach a natural history museum?

And i went oh it's gonna be so i just boldly she said why don't you approach the burke museum in seattle it's natural history museum and that's in 93 and so you had to make that scary phone call and so i knew that i'm a bit of a hustler and if i wanted to make a living i needed to make that scary phone call and and boldly think my stuff was good enough to approach this museum and.

That was a game changer because they said okay well let's talk we'll take it to the committee the committee came back and said yeah let's do it so i just knocked myself out like here there was in, seattle's biggest natural history museum and they've let this artist in you know and i'm already doing t-shirts and that kind of thing but people knew me from the t-shirts uh kind of in the seattle area but here i am putting on an art show in a natural history museum so i thought that

it was kind of interesting because i've got science right and i have all this crazy art that's come out of it but it's art so i really was straddling art and science at that point, but since then i've had two other shows at the burke i've had three exhibits there um over the years just had one during covid uh but yeah it turned out and i painted all over the walls work with scientists uh and i met my good friend kirk johnson at as a result of that exhibit and

uh he and i went on to do museum exhibits of our own and now he is at the smithsonian he's the director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which blows my mind. And I shamelessly name drop that all the time, but hey, he's my buddy. Yeah.

But it's just incredible. And I've had these natural history museum.

Exhibits tons of them uh now at this point really relatively but um and then there's these hybrid museums that have art and science and the anchors museum is like that and um the carnegie is like that and back in pennsylvania and so they have and then the oakland museum uh is like that too There's kind of science in one wing and then art in another, but they still explore the world in different ways, but I love that convergence of the two.

So I've had big exhibits at the Ampest Museum, the Alaska State Museum, Museum of the North, and also aquariums, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Seattle Aquarium, Point Defiance, la-di-da, la-di-da, and on. I like to say i do it all man because it's i do highbrow obscure mysterious art i do middlebrow art and i do dumb fart jokes too i do it all it's all there i've got t-shirts that say blow me.

And it's a blowfish it's dumb it's embarrassing almost but whatever i do it you know but it's also i like to do artwork that grabs your attention and i think that's what it all kind of kind of comes down to is attention and but with that sometimes it's just a joke but i also like to draw you in and maybe there's a deeper connection there there's something deeper about the art and i think you know if you look at my art i hope that you see that there's something deeper there it's not it's not just

uh you know skin deep it's some of it is i hope deeply resonant but you know this slides by a lot of people so, Spawn to die. Spawn to die, for instance, is kind of a dumb joke. But you know, in a way, it's deeper because it speaks to our biological connection to the world. We are in the same quest as our other creatures on this planet, you know? Love and death, love and death, love and death.

So yeah how often do you decide to make a piece of art into something like a dad joke or like you just said a fart joke versus a statement or do you see those as one in the same that a lot of truth can be said in jest absolutely i think you nailed it right there cody and yeah i started hearing about dad jokes a while back it's kind of funny that my son is now doing a whole film about what i do and it might just be one long dad joke dad joke rhymes with bad joke you know so

anyways yeah um they're not all good jokes and they're not all great ideas you know so uh yeah but yeah i. I go to the studio and i show up at work right that yeah and i think a lot of it is just showing up to work sometimes you step in the studio you don't know what's going to happen and that's when it's really exciting and other times i just want the comfort of knowing what i'm going to do in that studio and some you know the sketchbooks are full of stuff and i know there's

some heavier bigger ideas in there you know um that are more evocative or provocative statements, uh i like to think of evocative statements uh something that evokes a feeling or you know maybe as deeper um and i know i've got to spend some time with it and have the right blend of words and imagery and that's the mysterious you know what's going to work in a t-shirt, a t-shirt like the data is in the strata data's in strata it's just like a little rhyme you know,

doggerel, if you will, but in that it's just speaking to, oh, all right, the history of the earth is right there. It's under our feet. It's where we come from. It's what we are. So. Who has been the most surprising person you've seen or heard of wearing one of your t-shirts oh this is where i get the name check.

Uh daniel radcliffe wow harry potter walking down broadway wearing a spawn do you die t-shirt, so it turns out that a guy that i know plays played piano in the broadway show that he was in and gifted him that t-shirt okay and then uh some one of my facebook fans saw him walking into the theater and snapped a picture of that and sent it to me just kind of blew my mind like oh there it is wow um and then it's seeing my stuff here and there and it's you realize

that yeah my stuff is kind of part of the northwest scene the cultural scene and it's from there it's uh kind of seeped out into the world like a viral infection or something but yeah shown up in movies uh, got pictures of mud honey the grunge band from seattle wearing it motley crew mcmars and uh it's in the movie super bad you'll see some of my art in pineapple express, uh big miracle with drew barrymore it's in there trying to think of oh in the

hbo series the crime series true detective oh wow okay there's one that spot in the first season of that. Goes by for just a you know a nanosecond it's not like they linger on it but uh yeah but anyways Yeah, no, it's cool to see that out there. And a long time ago, when I wanted to make a living doing art, my goal was to.

And I have taught my students this too, or at least, you know, it's a goal that one should have is so that if your art is distinctive enough that when somebody looks at it, they can associate your name with it, you know? Yeah. So you could look at a Warhol, go, that's a Warhol, you know? And I've wanted people to be able to look at my art and go, oh, that's a troll. And I think now that I'm such an old man, I think I've been able to do that. Yeah.

Something I just thought of is getting back to how you always wanted to be a gallery artist. Are you, or do you ever feel like what you're doing is less than being a gallery artist or are you proud of where you are now?

I'm proud of where i am now um i think there was just a point where you're young and hungry, i really wanted to get to that level of selling the stuff for mega thousands of dollars just because you know the beauty of like wow if i did a painting that sold for all that money we could you know i was feeding my family um two kids and wife and house uh Uh, but as that dream kind of faded away, I was, you know, I still was in it. I was still in the game. I was just playing it another way. Yeah.

Um, and I could still, I could get my stuff into the galleries and I do have my stuff in museum collections, you know, in permanent collections at museums. I've just gone about it a really different way. Um, but I think of my approach sometimes, you know, Andy Warhol in the factory, he was doing pop art and the factory was just, he was cranking stuff out. Um, it's interesting mix of, but yeah, I don't have a, I feel happy that I've had the career and also I've always.

You know, the galleries are one thing, but then there's this beautiful thing called books. And keeping books in print or getting books in print or collections of your books has always been important to me. And I've got a dozen books now. And the last book that was done, I really feel a sense of, it really is one I'm very proud of.

And a clover press published it uh came out in january this year spawned to die the fin art ritual and it's basically i just sent a hard drive down a few years ago and uh trusted the designer there robbie robbins to do with it as he pleased and and we he laid it out and basically there it is my life you know kind of my life's work and i was like well i don't know that and And that's 40 years worth of my stuff. And when you're at this point in your life, well, I get another 10 years if

I'm lucky. Do I get another book? I don't know. But I feel good that it's in a collection like that. And it's a hard copy, if you will. It's not just out there on the web. It's something that will last. And I guess I wanted to make my mark somehow like that. I don't know. But doing these other books, too, that there have been these great collaborations.

And doing one with the brad mattson he was the writer i was the art guy words by and we were doing, having these great adventures and just uh creating independently but then it all kind of came together in a great kind of uh car crash of a book and that the arts all in there and nobody directed me to do the art i did all the writing and that's planet ocean dancing to the fossil record and then i repeated that kind of thing with kirk with cruising the fossil freeway

which was about 10 years of my life. And then we followed it up with cruising the fossil coastline. And that was about another 10 years of my life. And this is all the while I'm doing t-shirts and, uh, squeezed out a shark exhibit and squeaked out a whole exhibit on the buzzsaw shark, you know? So it all while being in a band and all while doing a podcast here too. What was it like the first time you look through Spawn Till You Die with all of your work laid out there for you?

Well, I was afraid to open it up, you know, when you get that first copy, because you just don't know how well it's going to be printed, how what the paper is going to be like, what the binding is like. There's all those things that can really make or break a book. But when I opened it up, I was really delighted at just the way it flowed. I was beginning to see the PDFs that Robbie was sending me as it was beginning to develop.

And we did a Kickstarter for it. It was right down to the last minute. And I didn't really know what the book was going to be like. But basically, it's got a couple of essays in the front. And then it's just art. it's just art and very tiny titles but I also just felt.

Tired okay you know just because when i look at it there's so much work that you know it's play to me and it's also day to day you know i'm lucky that my work is my play my play is my work but it's also work and i show up and it's there's countless hours of my life uh in there and um yeah so it's but it's so wonderful to see that it's just there you know you can leaf through it and enjoy the details and actually some of the things the way that robbie

laid it out too you can leaf through it and then there might be a big detail of something that maybe you miss but, yeah some of the pieces that are in there uh they're they're massive uh the originals are big like 10 by 15 feet or something and but a lot of them are t-shirt sized so, i wonder looking through that book and you said you felt tired you are looking at decades worth of work.

Was there any moment when you're looking at these pieces, you're looking at these pages, and you're thinking, I spent that much time kind of getting back, you know, to that concept of time we were talking about earlier. You know, I spent so much time on that piece. And it took up so much of my attention what else could I have been focusing my attention on at that time, Well, I could have been running more, walking more. I could be in better shape, you know?

Yeah, more politically involved, you know, trying to make a difference in the world that way. Maybe more time with my kids or my family but you know i was at all the ball games and stuff and i think i was in their lives as much as i could be but uh yeah uh. And it really was a matter of just showing up uh being your own boss and there's a lot of.

Freedom in that but there's also just a whole lot of uncertainty too you know you don't have the certainty of a paycheck and so you've got to be i never do you know so when the t-shirts kind of exploded um in the early 90s when they really took off and it was primarily an alaskan audience and then the people coming to alaska that's what started giving me the freedom to do some of these other things and and go fossil digging and you know there is

a lot of research that goes not only just in the time spent creating the art there's a lot of you know adventures that went into the art i did a whole uh chunk of time on the amazon and sometimes i look at that it's like well that was kind of maybe i shouldn't hear i'm an old pasty old white guy going to the amazon.

And uh but it just blew my mind uh the diversity down there and i spent a year on a painting, and i just follow my artistic muse you know so and the muse was i was absolutely enthralled with, amazonian fish after going down there and kirk was the one who invited me down hey man if you dig fish, you can't get them at the Amazon because the Amazon basin dwarfs anything else, uh, in terms of biodiversity. There's like 5,000 species.

On the upper end maybe 3 000 species of fish but three to five thousand species new species being found all the time and in the north pacific we have 600 species of fish and this is in fresh water down there it's just mind-blowing and the diversity is it just once again my brain exploded i ended up doing a mural of amazonian fishes that grew into a big amazon exhibit that traveled for years and so i was down in the amazon four times and uh then worked in all the,

exhibitry for it so it was a lot of time in my life but it taught me a lot and i collaborated a lot with scientists and i did a show at the miami science museum and that that exhibit travel, uh actually to overseas and up into canada so but that was you know there's the time doing the research and there's the time out fishing there's the time out digging fossils there's a time out i spent a whole lot of time driving around the american west with kirk johnson and um.

Learning about the prehistoric past with my own personal one-on-one phd the dude is a brilliant scientist and kirk taught me a hell of a lot and uh he's younger than me but i also spent a lot of time traveling around with my buddy brad masson that collaboration he's 10 years older than me, and uh he's the writer and i did four books with brad but um yeah i've learned a lot from being in a band etc etc so yeah. Do you have a dream paleo destination that you've always wanted to visit?

Why, indeed I have. Indeed I do. I'd like to go to Lyme Regis. I'd like to walk the chalk cliffs of Dover in England. The big limestone deposits over there too. The Lyme Regis, it's an area that's produced a lot of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and beautiful ammonites. And there's a woman there in the early 1800s by the name of Mary Anning. She was one of the first. She's dug up when she was 12 years old, found an ichthyosaur, and never got the credit she deserved in her lifetime.

But just this magical, wonderful place full of Jurassic sea life. And I'd love to just see those fossil deposits there. I'd love to go to the Gobi Desert, the red desert that's produced all kinds of great dinosaur fossils. And yeah, there's a lot of legendary fossil sites. But actually, you know, I'm here in Kansas where my wife and I have a separate, another place besides our catch can home. And this is fairly recent, but I'm kind of back to my stomping grounds, my college stomping grounds.

Uh actually literally in there my car's town but also um i'm very close to all the fossil beds here so the ancient ocean is here the cretaceous stuff okay and uh i love to go fossil hunting out there got my buddies out in western kansas and yeah. How about Alaska? What kinds of fossils or dinosaur species have we discovered there? Well, there's been some really incredible stuff that's been found in northern Alaska, in particular dinosaurs.

There's fossils all over the state. But in the 1960s, there was a bone bed that was found up along the Colville River by a man by the name of Liskum, last name of Liskum. It's called the Liskum Bone Bed. And they sat, and there was a bunch of bones. He brought them back, I think, to Fairbanks, to the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum there. And they sat there for about 20 years, and then someone looked a little more closely at them and realized he had thought they were mammoth bones.

And most people assume that's what they were, mammoth or mastodon. But it turns out they're dinosaur bones. Okay and that was a big revelation in the 80s that oh my gosh there were dinosaurs up in the polar regions because alaska was more or less where it's at you know geographically where you know the continents do slide around but back in the cretaceous it was basically in the same spot.

And even a little bit farther north but there were just hundreds of these dinosaur bones and uh so So there were a number of researchers that then started converging on it and a bunch of folks at Berkeley that went up and then Roland Gangloff launched several expeditions up there. And there's this whole thriving ecosystem up there. So long story short, in 2012, Kirk Johnson and I were able to hook up with Pat Druckenmiller, who is now the director of the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

But Pat and his buddy, Kevin, whose last name was Blake and I right now, and then Greg Erickson, we were all able to go out to the Colville River. And, of course, those guys are paleontologists, and I'm the artist tagging along. And I got to go digging dinosaurs in Alaska. And it's just mind-blowing, too, because it was very expensive to, you know, get up there and drive up the haul road. I'm going to take a small airplane out to the Culver River. No trees.

Got to worry about polar bears and brown bears. Kind of an interesting combo. Yeah. But within 20 minutes of stepping out of the airplane and walking along the river, boom, dinosaur bone. Really? Okay. Another five minutes, there's another dinosaur bone. and then actually to.

Um kind of make the point because i take a i'm a photographer two of sorts i i i uh said to the gang kevin may is his last name that just popped in my head i said hey why don't you guys, everybody in the next 20 minutes pick up every dinosaur bone you see and just bring it back here and let's put them all in one arrange them all in one square so they did that and of course i made it into the shape of a bed and then performance art style i laid on top of it and i was lying

on the fossil bed okay the bone bed yeah i was laying there in the phone bone bed took a picture but the point was too is that there were just all these there's so many bones and they're all of a duck-billed dinosaur and uh pretty much pat um assures me that just about everything that is found up there is bound to be a new species if not a new genus so it's pretty incredible he's continued to dig up there uh there's been some nova tv shows uh and they did some serious science on that

did some volcanic dating on on uh the site up there yeah there's great dinosaur finds and then down in my neck of the woods in southeast alaska i participated in uh discovering and, rediscovering some, uh, marine reptile sites. So, uh, and then got Pat Druckmiller to come down. And then once again, it was just my lifelong paleo nerddom.

Uh, I had landed in Ketchikan. Not only did I fall in love with fish, but my lifelong love of dinosaurs and anything prehistoric and ancient was intriguing to me.

So i uh got to know the local forest service geologist jim bashtal who took me out as he we started digging through some of the old records of where fossil surveys had indicated something so we actually went out to some of those sites and sure enough we found them so the bones of ichthyosaurs which are these giant marine reptiles uh which led to another bunch of discoveries and then yeah so that's been really fun doing that and i found my first trilobite in southeast alaska okay okay considering

the time we're living in now do you ever think about climate change, oh yeah um. It's interesting, you know, back in my sketchbooks from way back in the 90s, I've got some drawings about climate change and some of the paleontologists I was talking to at the time going on about it. Yeah, it's pretty – having been in Alaska for 42 years, I've seen the environment there change and the summers change. And, of course, I read the newspaper.

And, yeah, I think that knowing what the earth has been through before. And trying to get my head around the carbon cycle and big extinction events that have happened in the past. The world is a resilient place, but it's also a freaking fragile place, just like we humans. Some of us just won't die and others of us just fall over.

But the whole system is intertwined and sensitive and uh it's there's a paleontologist well you know there's a one of the guys we talked to once is that you know humans have lived through a lot of catastrophic events you know earthquakes and.

Floods and huge weather things and and actually climate change to a degree but we have never survived we've never been through a complete ecosystem collapse and that has happened on the planet before the fossil record shows that an entire ecosystem basically the world collapsing so these extinction events that start something starts in and it's it just levels the playing field of everything and cretaceous extinction it's you know most fingers now point to you know But actually the consensus

is that it was the asteroid that hit the planet 66 million years ago, maybe combined with big volcanic eruptions at about the same time. But 252 million years ago, there was the Permian extinction. When they both saw a shark, lived right before that, it didn't make it through that.

About 95 percent of the planet of the planet's life goes extinct everything everything goes huge, upheaval there cotaceous extinction it's not just the dinosaurs they check out the dinosaurs live on as birds they're they're of that group but the entire ocean changes and all the vegetation and the planet changes i mean everything it's not it's all connected and right down to the planktonic level plankton changes but the the the world died uh with permy at the permian triassic boundary

and you know the world died with the cretaceous and it looks like you know we're in the midst of it and it's a bit like the frog in the boiling pot you know if you just don't notice the change so much but we're seeing it in our lifetime and um the permian extension looks like it was, probably it's deeper back in time so it's hard to tell but it's probably volcanoes this huge section, of uh siberia it's called the siberian traps it just opens up and those volcanoes

blow for a hundred thousand years and barely anything survives um and that's the carbon cycle now I'm an artist explaining this, but, you know, instead of volcanoes this time, it's, uh. Uh, Volvos, it's automobiles. Uh, we are producing the carbon and burning the world and, uh, and we're seeing it and it's, it's, you know, it's not so controversial now, is it? You know, it's kind of like, well, it's happening, you know? So, so yeah.

So, yeah, I realize how I look around at the town, it's the national rainforest I live in and I just.

Relish every day that it rains because you know it's uh it's raining a lot there i've been here for just a few weeks but anyways um but i can already i begin to notice things like you know i've been writing down the day that the there's a mountain that i look at out our window and uh the day that the last snow was on that mountain and this year was about a month and a half earlier than it was last year so yeah time you made this social media post last year with a steinbeck quote

that you say is one of your favorites and it goes each in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things. Plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets, and an expanding universe. All bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

What is it about that quote that sticks with you?

It's kind of appeals to the inner hippie man but you know um that.

The interconnectedness and that was from steinbeck's journey that he took with uh ed ricketts in uh 1940 when they took the sea of quartet they took the uh the western flyer sardine singer down to the sea of cortez and steinbeck wrote that book the log in sea of cortez but he'd been hanging out with uh ed ricketts who was one of the first guys to really start thinking about the ocean in terms of ecological zones and ecology and they were having a lot of cosmic conversations there on

that boat um but steinbeck was able to articulate that that that astonishment that when you finally get it that You know, we are so connected to the world. We don't live separate from the world that we are animals ourselves. We are not the time to just not given to us. Um, and they realize like from the Joni Mitchell song, we are stardust, you know, we are stardust. We're made of, of cosmic dust. um. That it's a beautiful thought you know it's very beautiful thought and it's.

It's also kind of a scary thought too yeah you know but like you said the the complete ecosystem collapse so you know uh if that happens there's there's maybe this cascading thing that might trigger and the oceans die. So every time you hear about the plastic in the oceans and you hear about, algae blooms and we Alaskans are really tuned in to the ecology of the ocean with the salmon runs.

These are these kind of stream-born creatures from the forests that head out into the ocean and they're kind of messengers that go on in the world feed off of that great, gyre out there in the ocean and then come back and then if they don't come back it's like oh something's up and there's so much of our economy that's driven by uh salmon you know and so we are connected to this wild food source and things like food security we have a lot of we have a lot of biologists a lot of fish

scientists that work on salmon because that's something that we eat you know so we're directly connected to that. Well ray those are all the questions i have for you i want to thank you for your time your humor your honesty and your art well thank you and um it's been fun it's been a long and rambling conversation but welcome to the world of ray troll, when you talk to ray troll you get ray troll so wherever i went but uh yeah no it's like you put me on the couch there, man.

Yeah, so maybe I'll be archived away and this audio will be there and maybe we'll have said something that's relevant. But yeah, covered a lot of topics. Music.

For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoragemuseum.org. This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum. With additional help from Julie Decker. Chattermark's music is produced by Keys Open Doors. Music. Thank you.