Gary Staab might appear to be an ordinary guy.
He lives in small-town, rural Kearney, Missouri, with his wife, Lissi, and their two teenage sons, Max and Owen. He plays guitar for the Mechanical Prairie Dogs, and is learning to play cello in his spare time.
But for a living, Staab sculpts prehistoric monsters and ancient human ancestors. He constructs wooden skeleton bases, shapes and welds bodies with wire, crafts muscles and eyeballs and molds resin flesh with epoxy.
“I’m a paleo-artist,” Staab says. “I make models of everything from tiny insects to life-size dinosaurs.”
The National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History are two of Staab’s clients that commission regular work from him, but that’s just naming a few.
Have you ever seen Walt Disney's Dinosaur? Staab designed the models for three of the main characters. You know the two dinosaurs on display outside of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science? Those are Staab’s. Or how about the replica of King Tut’s mummy that was long on display here in Kansas City at Union Station? Yes, he modeled that, and it went on to be a part of a traveling exhibition.
The projects themselves take months — sometimes even years — and it all begins with fossils.
“Bones can tell a fantastic story,” Staab says. “Sometimes the science can give us a really good snapshot of what we know from the past, but there are parts of that story that are missing.”
That’s where Staab comes in. He receives casts of fossils, and more and more these days, he receives 3D medical scans from a printer Belgium. After receiving fossils, he spends a great deal of time building outward, layer by layer. In the case of a 3D scan, he carves inward for surface detail.
His studio space in Kearney is spread out across three two-level barns — one currently houses a life-size mammoth, to put things into perspective. He keeps casts of skeletons and bones, and stores jars full of perishable body parts he’s dissected or extracted for research in freezers.
“You have to know what things look like on the inside if you’re going to flesh them out,” he says.
Backing all of this process is a great deal of research. He considers it his responsibility to present the truth.
“I feel it’s an important thing now to be able to give people some perspective on the age of the earth and their place in it,” he says. “And the story of life on earth. It’s a vast project, but it’s a mission.”
While working on “Lucy,” our earliest human ancestor, for the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, Staab found himself in a particularly challenging situation.
“The stack of literature I accumulated to start my research is taller than she is,” he says. “It’s very intimidating to work on projects like that, icons of evolution.”
When he finally finished the project, its debut at the museum was met with great protest, mostly from Creationists. But he knows that any time he works on a human ancestor, or any of his assignments, he’s opening himself up for criticism.
“You can’t be a paleo artist and be afraid of being wrong,” he says.
There are decisions he has to make, like color or soft tissue choices, that are partly up to the imagination.
“A skeleton will give you a good blueprint, and if you pay attention there are things you know for sure,” he says. “But [I’m] trying to breathe some life into it, in a way that people can relate to it.”
He believes in the integrity of his work, and finds creating these visages of science and the past as a way of educating the public, greatly rewarding. But he can’t help but get personally involved with his work, even though. or especially because in the end of it all, his brush strokes, so to speak, have disappeared.
“When you’re working on this thing, it’s easy to get lost in the details,” Staab says. “Then at 3 o’clock in the morning you’re working on it, and you set the eyes and you put an eyelid over that, and there’s this moment where you look into the eyes of this thing, and it looks back at you, and you understand it as being something that’s relatable, and separate from yourself.”
