In Memory of Richard Ellis, Influential Artist and Author

Within recent days, the world has learnt of the passing of American writer, author, artist and natural historian Richard Ellis (1938-2024), best known for his many works on marine animals and their environment...

Caption: Richard Ellis in 1978, a portrait provided by the Ellis family and used in this obituary at The New York Times. Image: (c) Ellis family.

Richard and his work had a major and formative impact on myself, and I suspect on quite a few of you reading this article. I was lucky enough to have corresponded with him from the late 1990s onwards and thus had a modicum of insider info on his projects and thoughts. In view of all this, I felt it appropriate to pen some words.

Caption: I don’t (yet) own all of Richard’s books, but here are some in my collection here…

Growing up in New York and with a connection to the sea from an early age, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 before working at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as an exhibition designer. Richard ultimately gained enviable field experience with sharks, marine mammals and other marine wildlife worldwide, became an experienced diver, and underwent scuba and cage diving, including with Great whites Carcharodon carcharias. Even by the time he published his first book (1975, when he was in his late 30s) he was extremely well travelled.

I essentially know nothing of what led Richard to become a painter or writer, but it was a 1972 job for Encyclopedia Britannica (for their 1974 edition) that made him a professional illustrator. He did the sharks for that work and also the whales and assorted other animals too, turning in an incredible 40 paintings a month (Ellis 1975, p. 13). From these beginnings, he later had work published in Reader’s Digest, GEO, Sea Frontiers, Scientific American, Science Digest, Audubon and elsewhere, and exhibited his paintings in numerous galleries and museums. By the 1980s, he held associations with the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, American Society of Mammalogists, New York Academy of Sciences and the Explorers Club, and had a research affiliation with the AMNH.

An emphasis Richard made is that painting sharks from references isn’t easy since images (speaking here of a 1970s perspective) generally show dead, landed animals. You need to know how they functioned and fitted into the water. The following words will echo feelings familiar to many of you…

“I liked the way sharks looked. They seemed frighteningly efficient, and they reminded me of the fighter planes of World War II. I grew up in the era of the P-38, P-40, and P-41; as a boy in the early 1940s, I had an almost total preoccupation with the Mustang, Spitfire, ME-109, and the Zero. Eventually I grew out of this phase, but it was replaced by a more interesting group of streamlined, efficient “machines”, the sharks.” (Ellis 1975, p. 15).

Caption: this painting does appear in The Book of Sharks, but small and in black and white, not in the colour plate section. The version here was sent by Richard on Christmas cards, this one specifically from 2011. Image: (c) Richard Ellis.

He goes on in that section of his 1975 book – The Book of Sharks – to describe his total immersion in the world of sharks, both in terms of looking at them as live animals, learning about their three-dimensional form, and attending conferences, speaking to researchers, shark fishermen and trophy hunters, and shark keepers at aquariums and oceanariums. It was obvious that his level of experience was vast and considerable, even in the mid-70s.

Caption: one of the most striking features of Richard’s paintings is how vibrant the colours are. That’s especially obvious in the leaping Common dolphin Delphinus delphis at left, a version of which appears in the plate section of his 1982 Dolphins and Porpoises. I can’t get that same look to come across in the photos shown here (if I increase the contrast, the background blue just looks over-saturated). At right, a North Atlantic right whale Balaena glacialis, from 1980’s The Book of Whales. This is a really interesting painting because the perspective and crystal-clear view (not possible for the human eye to obtain) makes the whale look small. In reality, this animal is about 18 m long. Images: (c) Richard Ellis.

Helping to build life-sized whales and squid. To go back to that 1960s stint at New York’s AMNH, we know that Richard helped create the life-sized Blue whale Balaenoptera musculus model on display in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life. Its mid-1960s construction is itself related to the existence of an older and slightly smaller 1930s-era Blue whale model at London’s Natural History Museum (the construction of which I wrote about here).

Richard maintained connections with museum exhibition work later in his career, since he painted the life-sized giant squid on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1997 (Ellis 1998). I’m not sure if he was invited because of his (by then) respected status as an author-artist specializing on marine life, or if the museum really was in quest of someone with relevant knowledge and experience… either way, it’s a great connection.

Caption: the life-sized giant squid Architeuthis dux model on show at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, where it hangs in the main hall, surrounded by models, taxiderm specimens and mounted skeletons of other swimming animals. The position of the squid means that it’s a bit difficult to photograph. The cetacean making a guest appearance is a Pygmy killer Feresa attenuata. Richard painted this model squid. Image: Darren Naish.

Influential books on sharks and cetaceans. Richard’s 1975 The Book of Sharks was followed by the similar-format The Book of Whales in 1980 and Dolphins and Porpoises in 1982. All three are large and combine a plate section that features his spectacular, vibrant paintings with species-by-species accounts that cover natural history, ecology, behaviour and more. Naturally, The Book of Sharks is not intended to be a thorough coverage of all species (somewhere over 510 are recognized at the time of writing, and less than 300 were regarded as valid when Richard was writing) but it still serves as an excellent introduction. And it was a commercial success, with reprints occurring in 1976,1983 and 1989.

Dolphins and Porpoises was my first introduction to Richard’s work, and I well remember it being my staple reading for some chunk of the early 1990s. I adore its style, arrangement and picture-to-text ratio (very much not a trivial thing when it comes to book design). A major strength of the book is the presence of tidy diagrams and drawings that illustrate aspects of anatomy discussed in the text. When pondering living things and the way they look, we mostly think that pigmentation, ornamentation and shape is adaptive, and linked to behavioural syndromes and ecological specializations. That sounds like an obvious proposition, but it takes a lot of effort to learn about ‘form-function’ correlations of this sort and point them out, and it’s done well far less frequently than you might think.

Caption: I adore the black and white illustrations that appear throughout Richard’s two whale-themed books of the early 1980s. At upper right, the pale fields and patches on the body of Orcinus. Lower left, a juvenile Risso’s dolphin Grampus griseus, showing the prominent pale folds often present on the bodies of very young cetaceans. At right, various ‘blackfish’ (albeit not all of them) drawn to scale with a person. Image: Ellis (1982).

It’s actually quite funny that The Book of Whales and Dolphins and Porpoises turned out the way they did because, as Richard wrote in the preface to The Book of Whales (Ellis 1980, p. xi), the original intention was for there to be a single book, and for it to be a small pocket guide. I’m very happy that this plan went so disastrously awry.

Caption: more great images from Richard’s cetacean books, again showing interesting aspects of anatomy that generally hadn’t been shown in books before. Those here show (clockwise from upper left) different ventral pigmentation patterns in cephalorhynchine dolphins, the remarkable degree of sexual dimorphism in Physeter, the distinct dorsal and ventral sonar fields of Platanista hypothesized by Pilleri in 1979, and the steep hump-backed diving posture of Inia. Images: Elllis (1980, 1982).

It was thanks to cetaceans that I first got to know Richard. I never met him in person, but – like many people of my age (I’m somewhere in my late 40s) – I got to know a great many people thanks to the internet mailing lists and message boards of the late 20th century. Sometime around 1996, I was an erstwhile participant in MARMAM, the Marine Mammals Mailing List, still in existence today and operated from the University of Victoria. I was especially interested at that time in whales that people claimed to have observed, but which don’t match officially recognized species. Crypto-whales, if you like, a topic a younger version of me explored in some number of published articles. I’m pretty sure that’s why I first corresponded with Richard, probably because he was telling me to avoid paying attention to sources generally considered dubious. And on that note…

Caption: Richard’s first three books showcase many of his paintings in the largest format possible (err, excluding gatefolds), but a drawback is that many of them then cross the book’s spine. Such is the case in the painting at top left, showing a group of Sowerby’s beaked whale Mesoplodon bidens. At right, the spectacular cover of his 1980 The Book of Whales. Another thing that these books demonstrate is Richard’s versatility as an artist: pencil drawings, black and white diagrams, colour paintings, skeletal diagrams… At lower left, we see his drawing of a Heaviside’s dolphin Cephalorhynchus heavisidii. What a contrast in style to the colour paintings. Images: Ellis (1980, 1982).

On monsters and cryptozoology. Any writer interested in poorly known creatures of the seas and the history of human knowledge pertaining to them will, inevitably, develop a familiarity with cryptozoology. Richard touched on this subject in several of his books – his shark-themed works discuss claims that the megatooth shark Otodus megalodon might be alive today – and ultimately gathered enough material for his 1996 Monsters of the Sea (Ellis 1996). It’s fondly remembered and remains one of few technically well produced, mainstream books on the topic. Richard once scolded myself and my co-authors for failing to cite it (Woodley et al. 2011), a guilty oversight on our part.

Caption: it can be surprisingly difficult to find useable images of book covers online. They’re often at a resolution too low to be useful, or badly photographed at a weird angle. I’ve done my best to photograph some covers here but haven’t done an especially good job. Whatever, here’s the cover of the hardback first edition of Richard’s Monsters of the Sea (Ellis 1996)… a signed copy! Image: Darren Naish.

On cryptozoology, Richard was an avowed sceptic and was critical of cryptozoological claims and evaluations, and indeed of cryptozoologists themselves. A complaint one can make about cryptozoologists is that their statements about non-cryptozoological topics are often wrong or naïve. It often seems trite to point this out… but Richard liked to do it. My favourite, albeit trivial, example: in In The Wake of the Sea-Serpents, Bernard Heuvelmans says eels are “immensely powerful constrictors” (Heuvelmans 1968, p. 264), to which Richard responds “… they certainly are not” (Ellis 1996, p. 240).

Richard sometimes seemed a bit prickly when commenting on cryptozoological issues. In a TV show devoted to the examination of supposed unexplained phenomena, Richard was shown evaluating some bigfoot footage. “This is awful!”, says Richard in what sounds like a genuinely annoyed tone as a person in a costume – I assume – strides through a cornfield on the TV screen he’s viewing.

Caption: in case you’re wondering, the to-and-fro about the constricting abilities of eels has its origins here… the Pauline sea monster account of 1875, wherein a sperm whale off Brazil was seen in supposed battle with a long object twisted around its body. Heuvelmans (1968) thought that the long object was the gigantic crypto-eel – super eel – that he endorsed in his book. More recent suggestions include that the witnesses saw, and misinterpreted, the whale’s large, pale penis (Paxton et al. 2005), or that this was a whale entangled in rope (France 2019).

When preparing his 2019 book Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent, Robert France phoned Richard to talk about tuna (Richard was a tuna expert, having written the 2008 Tuna: Love, Death and Mercury). Richard “abruptly hung up the phone when thrice I contacted him” (France 2019, p. 248). I’d love to know what it was that made Richard so irascible. I put it that saying “Richard Ellis once slammed the phone down on me” is something of an accolade. A bit like being punched in the face by a famous boxer.

Richard and the discovery of the Megamouth. Having mentioned sharks, I have to recount another Ellis-themed anecdote. It’s a story that I’ve seen recounted several times online but not in print.

We know from comments made in 1991’s Great White Shark, a book that Richard co-authored with ichthyologist John McCosker, that Richard was aware of the discovery of the Megamouth Megachasma pelagios right from the off in November 1976. None other than Peter Benchley had phoned to tell him… though Benchley had wrongly referred to the new shark as a Megalodon, oopsie (Ellis & McCosker 1991, p. 44).

Caption: at left, the Megamouth holotype specimen as it looked after being brought to the surface following entanglement with the parachute sea anchor of US Navy vessel AFB-14 on November 15th 1976, at the Kaneohe Bay facility of the Naval Undersea Center. At right, a different specimen (the second one, captured off California in 1984) on show at the Los Angeles County Museum, photographed in 2009. It’s in a giant, glass-topped case which makes photography (with a normal camera) difficult. Images: Leighton Taylor; Darren Naish.

A common occurrence in the history of science is that people recognize or discover a thing, but then take years, even decades, to get it into print. Why are they taking so long, others say, despite knowing that just about everyone in science is overworked, underpaid, and perpetually on the brink of physical or emotional collapse. Such was the precise complaint of Richard and John when they visited Leighton Taylor at Honolulu in 1980. Taylor was supposed to be leading the Megamouth’s long-awaited description, yet it had so far failed to materialize. Richard and John hatched a plan.

One day, a surprised Leighton Taylor received an article, published in a Japanese-language ichthyological journal, describing a new species of remarkable shark that was one and the same as the Megamouth. He had been beaten to it by a rival team, the sort of thing that can happen any time a scientist or group of scientists are preparing work for publication. But to cut right to the chase, it was a spoof paper, cobbled together from random text on rhinos in captivity and the history of the domestic cat in Japanese art and featuring a pretend binomial (I’d like to know what that binomial was. I’ve been told in the past but have since forgotten. UPDATE: it was 'Megoura sandvicensis', see comments). A few clues gave the game away, and it’s this adventure that led to Richard and John being credited for “preparation of a preliminary manuscript which was of great help in the production of this final paper” in the technical description of the Megamouth (Taylor et al. 1983, p. 110). A fuller version of events can be found here at the late R. Aidan Martin’s elasmo-research site.

Caption: the Megamouth type description and official naming occurred in volume 43 of Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, published in 1983. Its second page features a full-page colour painting by Richard Ellis, part of which is shown here. Images: (c) Richard Ellis; Taylor et al. (1983).

Taylor et al. (1983) features on its second page Richard’s colour painting of a live Megachasma, so his place in the history of the species has been assured, practical joke or not.

Richard and Sea Dragons. At some point during the late 1990s or early 2000s, Richard jokingly told me that he was running out of animals to write about and thus had finally decided to tackle the great sea reptiles of the Mesozoic. Thanks mostly to my adventures at the dinosaur mailing list or DML – yes, another 20th century discussion board – Richard was aware of my interest in ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and their contemporaries (I’d also published a few articles on them by this time). Would I be able to review the manuscript for his book on these animals? Because I’m an idiot who’s always said yes to non-paying work, I said yes.

Caption: it’s hard to say from Sea Dragons whether Richard liked ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs or mosasaurs more. Maybe the cover demonstrates a bias for mosasaurs. Richard did his illustrations of these animals before it became widely known that they had vertical tail flukes.

As a consequence, I get extremely fair mention in the acknowledgements (p. xi) of 2003’s Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Oceans and am also name-checked a few times in the text itself (Ellis 2003). It remains one of comparatively few books devoted to Mesozoic marine reptiles, and of course I don’t need to say that I’ve contributed to that select number myself in recent years (Naish 2022).

As revealed in the preface to Sea Dragons, Richard’s plans to write about fossil marine reptiles extended back to the 1970s when he worked with Robert Bakker and first learnt about these creatures. It turns out that the two even considered co-operating on such a venture at one point. We all think of Bakker as a dinosaur guy, but in fact his influence on marine reptile studies has been profound too and – as I argued in my book (Naish 2022) – much of what’s happened in plesiosaur research over the past few decades can be pinned on an article that Bakker published in 1992.

Caption: a large sticker can be found on the inside cover of my copy of Sea Dragons, making it unique and highly valuable. Thank you, Richard.

Legacy: all the ocean’s animals. Richard’s quip that he was “running out of animals” was hardly true. Post-2003, he published additional books devoted to tuna (Tuna: Love, Death and Mercury, 2008), sperm whales (The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean’s Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature, 2011), swordfish (Swordfish: A Biograph of the Ocean Gladiator, 2013) and beaked whales (Beaked Whales. A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Conservation, 2017; co-authored with James Mead). Additional works covered the global marine environment, climate change and the evolution of life in the sea. There’s both a satisfying arc to the publication chronology of this body of work, and a bewildering, terrifying productivity that will hardly be matched by any living natural history writer.

Caption: two of Richard’s several 21st century books, these both devoted to cetaceans. I still don’t own the beaked whale volume, for shame, mostly because I have yet to see it appear at reasonable price. It’s very expensive.

And there ends my thoughts. Richard Ellis died on May 21st this year, aged 86, and my thoughts go to those who knew and loved him. Obviously, Richard and his books were and are personally important to me, but it’s no exaggeration to say that he has to be considered one of the most prominent, productive, respected and influential of writers on natural history in the modern age.

I don’t know that this was made clear to him during his own lifetime, but dearly hope that it was.

For previous articles relevant to the subjects mentioned here, see…

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Refs - -

Ellis, R. 1975. The Book of Sharks. Alfred Knopf, New York.

Ellis, R. 1982. The Book of Whales. Alfred Knopf, New York.

Ellis, R. 1983. Dolphins and Porpoises. Robert Hale, London.

Ellis, R. 1996. Monsters of the Sea. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Ellis, R. 2003. Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Oceans. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.

Ellis, R. & McCosker, J. E. 1991. Great White Shark. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

France, R. L. 2019. Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Heuvelmans, B. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. Hill and Wang, New York.

Naish, D. 2022. Ancient Sea Reptiles. Natural History Museum, London.

Paxton, C., Knatterud, E. & Hedley, S. L. 2005. Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a “most dreadful monster” seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734. Archives of Natural History 32, 1-9.

Taylor, L. R., Compagno, L. J. V. & Struhsaker, P. J. 1983. Megamouth – a new species, genus, and family of lamnoid shark (Megachasma pelagios, family Megachasmidae) from the Hawaiian Islands. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 43, 87-110.

Woodley, M. A., Naish, D., & McCormick, C. A. 2011. A baby sea-serpent no more: reinterpreting Hagelund’s juvenile “cadborosaur” report. Journal of Scientific Exploration 25, 495-512.