Utah State Magazine

Utah State

A SCHOOL OF EXTINCT PERCH swims in formation once again, fanned tails and arched fins rippling in a wave of freeze-framed motion that seems to roll across the surface of their limestone tomb.

United in death in the murky depths of a long-ago lake, they are being restored to life by artist Paul Jamison '82, who apologizes for his dusty handshake. When he turns on the air scribe in his garage studio, the dust will fly again as the vibrating tip delaminates the sedimentary rock concealing yet another fish raised from its burial site. Neither the lake nor the fish species survived the transition from semi-tropical Eocene to chilly, threadbare Pleistocene.

Jamison's painstakingly prepared murals, sculptures and vases of copper-toned fish and sycamore leaves in their original limestone settings fetch from $50 to $15,000 from decorators and homeowners who appreciate the natural artistry in a 50-million-year-old fossil.

Jamison extracts the fish from the Green River Formation in southwestern Wyoming. Where cattle graze today in the hilly, sand-trapped sagebrush steppe, flamingoes once floated among the cattails of a lake as saber-toothed cats stalked their prey in the nearby sycamores.

Jamison's art displays the natural artistry in millions-year-old fossils

"We may be landlocked in northern Utah, but we have access to marine animals that lived here millions of years ago," Jamison says. "Between our wealth of rare soft-tissue fossils, our trailside brachiopods, trilobites and echinoderms, and our proximity to the world-famous Green River Formation of much more recent vintage, there is a lifetime of discoveries to be made. We have a saying in this business, 'So many rocks, so little time.'"

In the Wellsville Mountains, a single split of the hammer can take him back 500 million years, revealing an animal "no one's ever seen, including its guts and gills." The miniscule hairs of a segmented worm, the antennae of a slug, the tentacles of a jellyfish can be seen in exquisite detail. Then there are the calcium-plated, bug-like trilobites that burst forth in the first explosion of multicellular life to rule the oceans for tens of millions of years - until they were wiped out in the biggest die-off of all time. "Like fossil hunting on steroids," Jamison says of the "weird and wonderful animals" he has found in this location. more