Beauty & Danger: Color-Coded Nature

The Wednesday Evening Color Salons are a public speaker series presented as part of The New Color, a course taught by Luanne Stovall, artist and color theorist. Each salon will pair a guest speaker with a color-focused topic. On March 6, the salon series welcomes Michael J. Ryan and Julia Clarke. 

Why do all animals yearn for beauty? From iridescent dinosaur feathers and peacock spiders to a male bowerbird's dazzling bachelor pad, color signals beauty, sex, danger, and death. Michael Ryan, a leading researcher in the field of sexual selection and evolutionary biologist and "Paleo Sleuth" Julia Clarke guide us through color's fundamental role in the evolution of life on planet earth. You'll discover why we can't resist the taste of beauty and why color is never "merely decorative." 

Print out your own poster for the Wednesday Evening Color Salons, using our PDF. 

Michael J. Ryan, Ph.D., Cornell University, is the Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology in the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin. Dr. Ryan studies animal behavior and addresses the mechanisms and evolution of animal communication. Most of his work has addressed sexual selection and communication in frogs and fish. Dr. Ryan has been a pioneer in the field of sensory ecology, which focuses on the information that animals gain from their environment, including what that information. His most recent book, A Taste for the Beautiful, The Evolution of Attraction, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. 

Julia Clarke, Ph.D. from Yale University Department of Geology and Geophysics, is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies birds and other theropod dinosaurs to better understand major transitions in the history of life. She is the John A. Wilson Professor in Vertebrate Paleontology in the Jackson School Geosciences at UT Austin and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. The Clarke Lab seeks new data to inform how avian diversity and distributions have changed across their deep histories. International collaborations and fieldwork (Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Antarctica, Mongolia and China) provide new fossil data to approach these questions.