If you hurry to the Discovery Center downtown at the Anchorage Museum, you'll catch an artist in action. By the middle of next month, James Havens expects to finish the largest canvas oil painting he's ever produced — 32 feet long and 11 feet tall.
For those who know Havens' work with the Alaska Paleo-Project, it won't come as a surprise to learn this painting depicts the Talkeetna Mountains about 80 million years ago. But what might be surprising is that the area was underwater back then.
Because of his prehistoric passion, Havens was tapped to create the mural, by paleontologist Patrick Druckenmiller, Earth Sciences Curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. Last summer, Druckenmiller took Havens along on an expedition into the Talkeetna Mountains that resulted in the discovery of two fossils of marine reptile species never before found in Alaska. The first, much publicized at the time is the elasmosaur — often compared to the mythical Loch Ness Monster.
The discovery of the second species, a mosasaur, came from a single tail vertebra no bigger than a breakfast biscuit.
“Pat is so good,” said Havens, “he can pick up a little bone and know exactly what it’s from. That’s absolutely amazing to me. I would have a hard time even seeing it as a bone. You know — looks like a rock.”
If the giant painting isn’t enough, Havens has plans to create two dozen life-sized sculptures, all of marine species found in Druckenmiller’s excavation area. When complete by early next year, Havens envisions a traveling exhibit that will tell the Talkeetna story.