Our Lady of the Late Jurassic – Archaeopteryx lithographica

Here is my latest painting, "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic" - a tribute to the amazing Archaeopteryx, my spirit animal and one of history's most legendary fossil creatures.When Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he proposed that paleontologists would discover a transitional organism in the fossil record between reptiles and birds. He rightly observed that birds have many reptilian features, including scales and claws and eggs - and according to the new theory of evolution by natural selection, all of their uniquely bird-like features would have been innovations on a basic reptile body plan sometime during the Age of Dinosaurs.But in 1859 no such creature had been discovered, and creationists pointed to this gap in the fossil record in their arguments against evolutionary theory. but by 1861 the first skeleton of Archaeopteryx had been discovered in the lithographic limestones of Germany, and in the 4th edition of Darwin's book he updated it to mention this bizarr