Illustrated History 1: Hidden potential

My parents took me to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum for the first time when I was 5 years old. Well, more like we ran from the parking lot to the museum to avoid being shot. At the time the area surrounding the museum was notoriously dangerous. For those of you who‘ve never seen any of the Night at the Museum films (p.s. let’s be friends,) the LANHM hosts nearly 35 million specimens/artifacts and covers 4.5 billion years of history. It’s quite grand and if you enjoy dinosaurs (they‘ve glued feathers on them now) or other dead animals, this is your place.

Those dinosaurs were impressive when I was 5, but there was one specimen that has held my interest to this day.

On the first level of the museum to the left of the entrance, my parents led me down a hallway where an unexpected coffin like tank appeared. I remember standing on my tippy toes to peer into the glass top filled with formaldehyde sludge to see a creature straight out of a water — genre horror film, a megamouth shark. Holding me up my mother read the plaque explaining that megamouth sharks currently inhabit all oceans, but only two had been seen on record at the time. This was the second shark. I stared down at that odd creature until my calves ached. I was fascinated that something that has been around for 79 million years had only been seen twice by human eyes. I went home that day with a craving for things that had become hidden from human view. I filled my library and browser with lost buildings and people, extinct flora and fauna, secret meanings, and underground passageways for the years that followed. It’s probably why I became an illustrator since illustration creates images that don’t exist or are hidden from view.

So join me on this illustrated trek as we dig up hidden pasts that have been buried by time and human modernization. Welcome to Jurassic Parrkkkk-errrr I mean, welcome to Illustrated History.