Fragment No. 74

The 17th century Caucasian dragon carpet shows an impressive age and a turbulent history, and the visual origins of the mythical dragon creatures reach back 5000 years in numerous cultures. What if we allowed a meeting between the mythical creature and its actual biological ancestors, the sea dragons?

Long before there were humans or even dinosaurs, there were ichthyosaurs (Ickies) - colossal marine reptiles that swam and thrived 250 million years ago in an ancient ocean in what is now Nevada. 

Last year, I had the great pleasure of designing the exhibit "Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada". The show, presented at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, is inspired by a thesis on gigantism presented in 2024 by Dr. Martin Sander, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Bonn, Germany. Dr. Sander travels annually to rural Nevada to study and excavate fossil beds containing prehistoric ichthyosaurs. Some species were larger than a locomotive and are considered by some to be the largest reptiles that ever lived on Earth. The eyes of ichthyosaurs measured nearly a foot in diameter, the largest of any vertebrate. The ichthyosaur, which means "fish lizard" in Greek, lived in prehistoric seas for 160 million years before becoming extinct. 

In April 2025, Martin embarks on his next ichthyosaur excavation expedition, this time in the Rocky Mountains, in northeastern British Columbia, in the Sikanni Chief River bed. The finds are similar to those in Nevada, but 20 million years younger and even larger. They are unique in the world and are the best evidence that the largest Ickies were as big as blue whales or even bigger. 

Martin agreed to take fragment #47 of the Dragon Carpet to his next remote dig site to photograph next to the fossil finds. The meeting of the two dragons will reveal a compelling analogy: just as the dragon motif of the rug became more and more distorted over a period of 200 years as several generations of Caucasians copied the original Chinese design over and over again, the fossil remains of ichthyosaurs were fragmented and deformed by geological forces over millions of years, sometimes beyond recognition to the untrained eye.

And when we juxtapose the 400 years of the dragon tapestry with the 250 million years of the sea dragons, we become aware of another dimension of travel and exchange: the inexorable slow movement of entire continents, from the supercontinent Pangea that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic to the continents as we know them today.