How to find something new in a long-dead dinosaur
By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences
Paolo Verzone has an eye for the dramatic. The three-time World Press Photo award winner has crisscrossed Norway’s Svalbard to document life in the high Arctic. He’s taken Antonio Banderas’s portrait on a moment’s notice amid the glitz and glam of Cannes. He’s even photographed the lethal hands of a retired Mafia hitman—an assignment that still makes him shudder.
But how can photography bring life and drama to subjects that have been dead for more than 66 million years? That was Paolo’s mandate for the cover story of this month’s National Geographic, a deep dive into the new science of dinosaurs. (Above, paleontologist Samir Zouhri at a site in Morocco.)
In part, Paolo used lighting to make bones feel alive, even familiar. When photographing fossils of the dinosaur Spinosaurus—which new evidence suggests spent much of its time in the water—Verzone repurposed a half-filled water bottle to imprint subtle ripples on the light striking the bones. The goal: to invoke the memory of water in the viewer.
"It’s something that you feel somehow, it’s déjà vu,” he tells my colleague Michael Greshko. “Of course, it’s not normal to see that on a bone from a dinosaur, but the feeling… it’s a warm feeling, it’s comfort.”
“I’m trying to describe the feelings I have when I do these lights,” Paolo adds. “It’s kind of magical sparkles that can bring anything to life.” (Above left, team members examine a Spinosaurus tail vertebrae; at right, long spines of bone protrude from the Spinosaurus tail vertebrae.)
But for Paolo, the story of dinosaurs isn’t about bones locked away in stone; it’s about the dreamers and thinkers who study fossils and dig them up in even the harshest conditions. “It’s all about the humans,” he says. “Dinosaurs come out to light only because humans work in the dark.” (Below left, a statue of Triceratops, outside Morocco’s Tahiri Fossil Museum; at right, the museum.)
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Today in a minute
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One photo, 1,000 words: This protester carries a sign during a 1961 boycott of Woolworth’s in Columbia, South Carolina. Lennie Glover, a divinity student seeking equal treatment for Black and white customers, was stabbed during a sit-in at the local department store, prompting the boycott. The image by Cecil Williams is among the collection in South Carolina’s only civil rights museum, which Williams, now 83, designed and built.
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