Bio:

I grew up on the Spanish island of Mallorca, in an American household. As a child I loved to draw, and I loved nature. I raised baby sparrows that had fallen out of their nest, kept mosquito larvae in a jar in order to watch them hatch, and drew things I saw under the microscope. An English friend and I set up a Natural History museum in the wood shed where we displayed bones, fossils and shells we’d found (to say nothing of the skull of my pet hamster, which in the name of science I had dug up a year or two after it died).

When I was still in high school, my father wrote a book about the plants of Mallorca, and I did pen-and-ink drawings to go with it. This was my first illustration job.

In college I majored in art, but continued to be interested in biology. I went on to illustrate all sorts of things: first grade readers, folk tales, classroom materials for the science show Nova, a children’s science dictionary fro Scholastic, books about local mammals and birds and more. I became especially interested in paleontology when a paleontologist friend of mine asked me to create a reconstruction of a prehistoric goat. Since then I have done other reconstructions, and I like the challenge of bringing the past to life. I also love explaining things in both words and pictures. I got to pull all my passions together in a trilogy of books about the deep past for National Geographic Children’s Books: When Fish Got Feet, which covers the greening of the planet and the emergence of the first tetrapods, When Bugs Were Big (coal swamps, bugs, and the first reptiles), and When Dinos Dawned, which takes us into the early Mesozoic and describes the emergence of many new animal forms including the first dinosaurs and the first mammals.


Writer/Illustrator
PAL
Member since 2000
Region: Spain

Contact Information

Current Location:   Palma de Mallorca

Published In Children's Market: Yes
Available for Speaking Engagements? Yes