John Gurche is an American artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and sketches of prehistoric life, especially dinosaurs and early humans.
[3] Also while in middle school, Gurche attempted to create a "family tree for all animal life," and fashioned an evolutionary series of heads from clay while in fourth grade.
He has created illustrations for National Geographic,[4] and designed a set of four dinosaur-themed stamps that were released by the US Postal Service in 1989.
[2] In 2000, he received the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology for his mural of Sue the Tyrannosaurus, a piece which accompanies the dinosaur's skeleton at the Field Museum.
[6] In 2013 he published a book detailing his work on the fifteen paleoanthropology projects he had completed for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History's Hall of Human Origins titled Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins .