American Museum of Natural History, New York: T.Rex The Ultimate Predator Exhibit

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

March 11, 2019 the American Museum of Natural History in New York at Central Park officially opened up their new exhibit T.Rex: The Ultimate Predator on display until August 9, 2020 and it contains some of my work, as T-Rex was supposed to have tetrachromatic vision, as those were the ancestors or our today's birds, which have tetrachromatic vision, i.e. can see also UV (ultraviolet), which we humans cannot!

I have always been amazed about the differences in our human trichromatic color perception and how that very same flower would look like, if seen through tetrachromatic eyes, being able to also see ultraviolet (UV) light, invisible to us humans!

Hence why I developed a method to simulate that, by mapping a 4-dimensional tetrachromatic color space into our trichromatic 3-dimensional one - and this will be shown at that T Rex exhibit in NY! Notice the to us invisible patterns!!

Human (Stereo image, parallel and cross eye):

T-Rex (Stereo image, parallel and cross eye):

 

[Asher Kelman]

Brilliant, Klaus!!

.....and also handsome!

Also why not add a monocot like an iris or agave

How did you go about choosing how to map the colors. Are their some, logical, imaginary or conventional guidelines

But any chance one can look at the lineage to see if the also might have been able to appreciate a 5th channel of polarization?

Asher

 

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

Thank you, my wife and I have just been there an got a private tour through the exhibit with one of the AMNH scientists I worked with.

The color mapping is somewhat arbitrary, as UV by definition has no color, but I chose a bright blue for that, as 4 "colors" had to be
squeezed into our three color space (Blue, Green, Red), so of course it works well with yellow flowers.

Polarization (which we humans CAN see if being trained to see it...) was not part of this ...

 

[Asher Kelman]

Fabulous as it is!

Asher

 

[Dr Klaus Schmitt]

Thank you!