Stephen A. Czerkas (born September 19, 1951, in

Alhambra, California Alhambra (, , ; from " Alhambra") is a city located in the western San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County, California, United States, approximately eight miles from the Downtown Los Angeles civic center. It was incorporated on July ...

) was an American sculptor and paleontologist. He frequently worked as a contributor to both museums and the motion picture industry, and was later the director and co-founder of The Dinosaur Museum, which purchased the

Archaeoraptor "Archaeoraptor" is the informal generic name for a fossil chimera from China in an article published in ''National Geographic'' magazine in 1999. The magazine claimed that the fossil was a " missing link" between birds and terrestrial thero ...

fossil chimera. His life-sized replicas of dinosaurs, including members of the

Deinonychus ''Deinonychus'' ( ; ) is a genus of Dromaeosauridae, dromaeosaurid Theropoda, theropod dinosaur with one described species, ''Deinonychus antirrhopus''. This species, which could grow up to long, lived during the early Cretaceous Period (geo ...

and

Allosaurus ''Allosaurus'' () is a genus of large carnosaurian theropod dinosaur that lived 155 to 145 million years ago during the Late Jurassic epoch ( Kimmeridgian to late Tithonian). The name "''Allosaurus''" means "different lizard" alludi ...

genera, were among the first to incorporate accurate feathering and dorsal spines.

Life and work

Czerkas' sculptural works have been featured in the

National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with ...

, the

Vienna Museum of Natural History The Natural History Museum Vienna (german: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien) is a large natural history museum located in Vienna, Austria. It is one of the most important natural history museums worldwide. The NHM Vienna is one of the largest museum ...

, and the

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is the largest natural and historical museum in the western United States. Its collections include nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts and cover 4.5 billion years of history. This large coll ...

, among other museums. In addition, Czerkas contributed to the motion picture industry, notably producing photorealistic sculptures for the 1977 film ''

Planet of Dinosaurs ''Planet of Dinosaurs'' is a 1977 science fiction film. Set in an unspecified future, the film follows the journey of Captain Lee and his crew after they crash land on a planet with similar life conditions as Earth, but millions of years behind in ...

''. He is perhaps best known for his part in the

controversy, in which Czerkas purchased a part-bird, part-dinosaur specimen for The Dinosaur Museum from a Chinese dealer. This fossil specimen courted a great deal of controversy, after which it was determined that the fossil had been glued together as a composite of multiple species. This controversy continues to circulate in

creationist Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. Gunn 2004, p. 9, "The ''Concise Oxford Dictionary'' says that creationism is 'th ...

media sources as a purported example of widespread fraud in the evolutionary sciences. Czerkas had a wife, Sylvia. Stephen Czerkas died on January 22, 2015, of

liver cancer Liver cancer (also known as hepatic cancer, primary hepatic cancer, or primary hepatic malignancy) is cancer that starts in the liver. Liver cancer can be primary (starts in liver) or secondary (meaning cancer which has spread from elsewhere to th ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Czerkas, Stephen A. American male sculptors American paleontologists 1951 births 2015 deaths