In my corner of synthetic biology, I spend a lot of time thinking about selections. A selection is an occurrence (natural or engineered) where the members of a population goes through a process which favors some trait that only a subset of the the population possess. By going through this process, the population that survives the selection can be assumed to have had the winning trait. Many readers will be familiar with the concept of a selection through this famous 'survivorship bias' figure:

This figure symbolizes the idea that in World War II, planes returning to base after dogfights were riddled with holes in the blue areas. Militaries saw this data and reinforced those areas, but to their dismay the reinforced aircrafts weren't hardier to battle. This triggered the realization that the blue dots were a trait of surviving aircrafts, and the parts of the plane without damage were the parts in need of reinforcement.

Within my corner of synthetic biology, this principle can be used to create mechanisms for enriching a bacterial population that carries a desirable trait. For example, when I'm screening enzyme X, if I can link that enzyme's performance to growth of the cell, then I can grow a library that contains millions of different genetic variants of enzyme X under selective conditions, and the mutants with the highest representation in the output population can be speculated to have the best-performing enzyme X.

I wanted to throw an event that combined a bunch of ideas together. The YouTuber Kurzegesagt made a video about the selective pressures of fossilization, which can be viewed below:

The core principle is that high-biodiversity ecosystems such as jungles were unlikely to have as much robust fossilization. Knowing what we know about the oddness of jungle creatures today and the dinosaurs we have evidence existed, the theme for the event was to create a speculative dinosaur not captured in our fossil record. The event was called LOST DINOSAURS. Attendees could bring their creature as any type of visual art, writing, costume, or interpretive dance.

In preparation for this event I painted a painting with several speculative dinosaurs of my own (main article image). I then sculpted the head of the central creature to mount on the wall as a decoration for the event (below). This was the basis for invite materials and decorations. I made a high quality print of this painting and awarded it as the prize to whoever created the best speculative dinosaur.

A subset of the submitted dinosaurs can be seen below. The winner was the watercolor illustration of a creature that had traits from several different species of known dinosaurs including Triceratops, Iguanadon, and Pteranodon, while displaying the bright aposematic coloration we expect from jungle inhabitants such as tree frogs.