In the late 1980s, after the publication of The Dinosaur Heresies, there was a firestorm of public interest in dinosaurs, as new ideas that made them much more dramatic creatures poured in from the scientific community. They were active! Some were warm-blooded! Many were social, caring for their young or hunting in packs! I was fortunate to be involved in the presentation of these ideas to the public, doing art for magazine covers (National Geographic Magazine, Discover Magazine, Natural History Magazine), dinosaur stamps by the U.S. Postal Service, and the movie Jurassic Park.

The American Museum of Natural History decided to create a spectacular dinosaur tableau for their rotunda exhibit. This would be composed of three skeletons, with a mother Barosaurus rearing on its hind legs to protect its baby from a marauding Allosaurus. The AMNH contacted me in 1990 to create a painting of this scene, so that a reproduction could accompany the rotunda mount. I accepted the challenge.

One challenge in creating the painting was to capture the enormity of the scene. The head of the mother Barosaurus is five stories up from its feet! In dealing with this, I had to make the perspective change quite a bit from the lower part of the painting to the upper part, where everything is seen from below. The clouds had to change, the pterosaurs had to change, and the dinosaur itself had to change so that the head is looking down at us from a great height.

There is debate among scientists about whether a huge sauropod such as this could actually rear up on its hind limbs. The Smithsonian's paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues replied to questions about this: "Yes, but only once."

A reproduction of the painting now accompanies the AMNH rotunda mount. The rotunda mount, and my fleshed-out painting of the scene, has become the AMNH's symbol of the dynamic new ideas about dinosaurs.