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Ray Troll stands in front of Kings, a mural that he painted in 1998 in the lunchroom at Ketchikan High School. Playing with the theme of the school's salmon mascot, each square represents a different king. The first student to name all the kings won a scholarship. Photo by Hall Anderson.

Ray Troll '81 sees plesiosaurs playing in the clouds. He pictures nurse sharks circling him in his hospital room, and he spots trilobites in the desert sky. He calls Charles Darwin “Chuckie D” and paints pictures of him hugging fish and driving dinosaurs around in an “Evolvo.”

He sees these things and he wants you to see them, too. Nature, history, prehistory, and evolution—they’re all around you. “Just look at them,” he says, whether he’s holding a pencil, pen, paintbrush, or a guitar.

One of his most recent drawings, a pastel he has titled, “The Paleohunter’s Den” is at first view a mundane picture of a guy in a plaid shirt watching TV. But mounted on the wall behind him are the deer of prehistory, fantastic, but real. One antler, twisted antlers, antlers branching out from the snouts, they’re all based on renderings of deer fossils that Ray unearthed in an old book. “What do you think?” he says, holding the picture out. “Look at that one.”

Ray Troll is a primate of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. If he were sub-subspecies, he might be categorized as a popular artist, a wit, a fish-lover, or best yet, a scientific surrealist obsessed with evolution. The 52-year-old bearded male admits that humans are just a speck in the history of life on earth. While they figure into his artwork, they’re hardly the most interesting, he says. But it’s fun to mix them in with the ancient sharks, the ammonites, and the waterscapes.

His habitat is Ketchikan, a southeast Alaska city snugged up between a rainforest and the salty water of the Tongass Narrows. If you look from the window of his studio over the real bones and fossils and small plastic dinosaurs that line the sill, you can see the blues and greens and grays of the far Northwest, the colors that resonate in his art.

Troll peers from behind a poster advertising his "DaVinci Cod" t-shirts at a Ketchikan gift shop. Photo by Hall Anderson.

In the past few years, Ray has traveled the West with a paleontologist working on a book about the fossil highlights of America. He has also done artwork for an interactive exhibit at the Smithsonian, floated the Amazon in search of exotic fish, and lectured on campuses around the country, reaching out to science students with his art and to art students with his love of science. In the past few months he has spoken at Cornell University about “The Artist’s View of the History of Life,” written a song about evolution titled, “The Devonian Blues,” and come up with a “DaVinci Cod” t-shirt design, a bestseller among both Alaska tourists and Dan Brown fans.

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