I spent years researching the historical ecology of California's past 10,000 years, including the history of rich grasslands, oak woodlands, coastal habitats, and wetlands filled with abundant salmon, tule elk, grizzlies, condors, and other diverse species. Fire ecology, flood processes, and cultural traditions were highlighted in a book project, A State of Change: Forgotten landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010). I am in the midst of updating the book for a third edition to be published by Heyday! See more.

Also visit my website California Ecological Origins for more detail on Holocene wildlife, vegetation communities, and conservation biology.

Another book project I am researching, writing, and illustrating, is a deep guide to the of the Ice Age of Western North America. This is a project long in the making, and I have been illustrating the various megafauna and Pleistocene scenes for decades. The book will focus on the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age, and will be my paleoart view of traveling back in time to this lost world. See more on the Ice Age book project.

This section highlights projects I have done on the Pleistocene Irvingtonian Land Mammal Age in California, using illustrations and paintings I did for the Math/Science Nucleus Children's Natural History Museum in Fremont, California, and for the Fossil Discovery Center in Madera, California. See more Irvingtonian illustrations here.

I am currently working on paintings illustrating scenes of life from the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, specifically the Clarendonian, Hemphillian, and Blancan Land Mammal Ages, plus a Rancholabrean scene, for a major museum upgrade in California. My research material and drawings will be turned into a booklet for the museum describing the amazing diversity of animals and plants in central California during these times. See more of this current project here.

See my research materials, sketches, detailed drawings, and the final painting for a Tertiary savanna scene done for a museum at Badlands National Park. This painting was used in the book The White River Badlands, by Rachel Benton, Dennis Terry, Jr., Emmett Evanoff, and H. Gregory MacDonald (Indiana University Press, 2015). I've collected these illustrations here.

Also for a museum at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, this section collects research materials and sketches, as well as the final oil painting, in one place for the Chadron Formation where oreodonts and brontotheres roamed through diverse subtropical woodlands and grassy glades. This painting was used in the book The White River Badlands, by Rachel Benton, Dennis Terry, Jr., Emmett Evanoff, and H. Gregory MacDonald (Indiana University Press, 2015). I describe the detailed paleobotany of this scene. See more here.

This is a long-term project to catalog and reconstruct fossil plants and ecosystems of the Mesozoic, in order to try to imagine better what this era was like when dinosaurs dominated these habitats. I have a Patreon page where I am uploading content. See more here.

Check out the mural I painted on the side of the Geology building at Fresno State Univerity in California, showing the Cretaceous seas of the Moreno Formation, here.

Illustrations of the Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western U.S. showing huge Apatosuarus dining on fern-cycadophyte prairies. This illustration was used in John Foster's 2007 book, Jurassic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World (Indiana University Press). See the research materials, sketches, and final illustration here.

A painting in progress with accompanying research materials and illustrations of the Lower Jurassic Kayenta Formation of Utah, Arizona, and surrounding states. Sarahsaurus herds browsed on cycadophytes in an arid playa edge. See sketches and the work in progress here.

This 2013 book is out of print, but I gather all the illustrations here, plus additional material such as spot illustrations that didn't make it into the book. See more here.

At Fresno State University in California, I painted this winding mural that climbed a staircase in the Geology Building. The mural depicted scenes from each geologic era and period starting with deep time and the Big Bang as the universe formed. See portions of the spiralling mural here.