Abstract
Tropical rain forests offer stunning exhibitions of animals and plants. Many artists have tried to portray this richness, none better than the French painter Henri Rousseau. His canvases, filled with curious primates and fearsome wild cats, grace the walls of leading museums, and reproductions appear on the covers of ecology textbooks. Despite Rousseau’s lack of formal scientific training or travel to equatorial regions, his paintings capture many of the central themes in modern tropical ecology. A biologist wandering through a Rousseau retrospective would marvel at how the Parisian anticipated such key topics as the importance of predation by large cats on large plant-eating mammals, the abundance of plants whose seeds are animal dispersed, and even a visual hint of the rarity of tropical forest dwellers.
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© 2013 Eric Dinerstein
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Dinerstein, E. (2013). A Jaguar on the Beach. In: The Kingdom of Rarities. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-207-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-207-5_3
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