Cash Ryder Lanspeary Art Scholarship

It was a tough decision, but I eventually landed on sketching *Archaeopteryx* - apologies to the *Ankylosaurus* lovers out there, it just wasn’t their time. All jokes aside, it was genuinely nice to pick up a pencil and draw traditionally again. The courses I’ve been taking recently, while surprisingly dinosaur relevant, have mostly been contained to digital platforms… so my sketchbook was collecting some dust. In my eyes, you can’t go wrong with a trusty pencil, so my piece is made with graphite on paper. And, of course, a little love sprinkled in! I’m quite the bird fanatic so it is only natural that my favorite dinosaur is *Archaeopteryx.* I looked at a lot of reference photos while drawing, some of live birds, some of bones, but also quite a few artists’ interpretations of what *Archaeopteryx* would have looked like. It’s deeply fascinating to me that their plumage is still a mystery. Sure, people can make educated guesses on what its body looked like based on the placements of the bones, but the coloring is another story. I’m obsessed with these silly guys, their development of flight feathers, and their link between dinosaurs and today’s birds. I also find it absolutely iconic for these creatures to be mysterious so many years later, causing conflicts between scientists even after they’re long gone. That tickles my fancy. Not to stray too far off topic, but I did want to talk about how dinosaurs are a part of my education. I’m studying art in southern Utah and there have been plenty of discoveries for archaeologists here. My geology class taught about mudtracks and we even took a field trip out to the local museum to see footprints and special fossils. I never got to meet Cash, but I do think he and my head animation professor would have got along splendidly. My professor, Alex Chamberlain, 3d printed an ENTIRE life-size t-rex skeleton! The mall displayed it and he was even in the news. Chamberlain talks about dinosaurs all the time in class, and some of our assignments involve animating them, sadly he hasn’t had time to teach his dinosaur-specific elective though. I bet Cash would have aced that. I think it’s beautifully poetic that Cash loved dinosaurs so much. Could be my art brain speaking, it’s just something about him caring so deeply for the details of these creatures from millions of years ago, ones he never met, it makes me think he’ll still be remembered millions of years down the line too. Even when life is cut tragically short, people still leave an impression on the universe, like a fossil. I sadly learned this through the death of my close friend. But, those you love will never disappear. And, like Archaeopteryx, I bet they have some sneaky mysteries to uncover too!