Art Illustrating Science - The image shows a scientific illustration of the luxuriant forest that once covered East Greenland during the Late Triassic (~200 million years ago). The illustration was drawn by the talented scientific illustrator Marlene Hill Donnelly working at The Field Museum in Chicago (the artwork was commissioned by Jennifer McElwain, UCD). It captures the vegetation that grew 200 millions years ago in East Greenland, and shows how the now extinct plants that were found as fossil leaves in the rocks would have looked. This highlights how important art is to science as it enables fossils and scientific data/findings to be brought to life for all to see. This image was also chosen for the front cover of Nature Geoscience for the issue that contained our paper (June 2010) see Belcher et al., 2010 in http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n6/full/ngeo871.html

This image shows the vegetation reconstruction associated with the 2010 Nature Geoscience paper on the front cover of the journal. The caption reads "An episode of climate warming 200 million years ago was associated with catastrophic environmental changes. Experimental and palaeontological data suggest that a climate-driven shift to more flammable leaf shapes contributed to increased fire activity in East Greenland at this time. The image shows a scientific illustration of the luxuriant forest that covered East Greenland during the Late Triassic. Illustration by Marlene Hill Donnelly, commissioned by Jennifer McElwain. Letter p426; News & Views p381" This highlights how art is not just relevant to communicating science to all, but also to scientists themselves.

Science Illustrating Art - I have recently been collaborating with the artist Jessica Mander at Edinburgh College of Art. Jessica’s work seeks to investigate the origins of the deeper structures of repulsion and attraction of erotic art, how they have changed over time, and the process of disseminating erotic art to the public; a far cry from the realms of fire science. Jessica’s idea was to visualise the transfer of heat between bodies which is where the science bit fits in. Our collaboration enabled Jessica to capture heat transfer or variations in heat using thermal imaging. I use this technique frequently to capture the heat generated by fires (as you can see in my project entitled "Fuelling the Palaeoatmopsheric Oxygen Debate") so we decided to apply this to illustrate Jess’s ideas, part of which can be seen in the image I have uploaded. You can read more about Jessica Mander’s work on http://jessicamander.carbonmade.com/