Rancho La Brea Megafauna Animations

date. 2022

client. La Brea Tar Pits and Museum 

description. In California, 13,000 years ago, huge ice age mammals that had roamed the landscape for millennia, suddenly ceased to exist. The cause is believed to be catastrophic man made fires that made the ecosystem of Rancho La Brea vulnerable to climate change.

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Working with paleontologists Regan Dunn and Emily Lindsey, I was tasked with creating a series of four illustrations depicting the different climatic stages of Pleistocene Southern California. These illustrations were made for and published in the August 2023 issue of Science Magazine, accompanying the paleontologists' feature article. All illustrations were originally painted digitally in Adobe Photoshop, and later brought into Adobe After Effects to create the parallax animations that accompanied the online version of the Science report. In addition to Science, illustration in this series were also featured in online versions of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum website, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County website, and The Consersation.