Erwin S. Christman

Erwin Sachem Christman (January 14, 1885 – November 14, 1921) was an American palaeoartist, known for his sculptures of Cenozoic mammals, skeletal reconstructions, and his work on the famous 1912 skeletal mount of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Early life
Little is known of Christman's early life, aside from that he was born in Clinton, New Jersey on January 14, 1885. He studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design, working under the supervision of palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Career
His first published illustrations were a series of illustrations of the holotype of Tyrannosaurus rex, published in 1906. In 1912, he produced a scale-model diorama for a planned Tyrannosaurus mount; this early version was shelved for its complexity. Subsequently, he provided skull diagrams for Barnum Brown's 1916 paper describing the hadrosaur Prosaurolophus maximus, a suite of reconstructions of the sauropod Camarasaurus lentus for Osborn and Charles Craig Mook's 1921 monograph, and several illustrations and sculptures of brontothere heads. Christman died on November 14, 1921, in New York City.