The Cave Bear Logo

I recently received a great honor: I was chosen to design a logo for the informal society of palaeontology students and other palaeo-minded people in the University of Helsinki. The club, named after the late palaentologist and writer Björn Kurtén, just celebrated its 20th anniversary and announced a new logo.

The cave bear was a natural subject, because Helsinki has a huge collection of cave bear bones, excavated by Alexander von Nordmann near Odessa in the 1800s. They have been the subject of many studies, the specialty of Helsinki being quantitative, ecologically minded study of extinct mammals. In these studies, fossils are not dead things, but populations of living animals - making the live bear silhouette especially fitting. And lastly, the name Björn literally means 'bear' in Swedish! The club members seemed to appreciate the new logo. I was even told Kurtén, who died on the year I was born, would have approved it.

You can read a bit about the club from here: blogs.helsinki.fi/bk-club/

Björn Kurtén was quite a character. Among other things, he correctly predicted much of what we now know about the intelligence of neanderthals, their interactions with modern humans, and hybridization, in his paleofiction novels published all the way back in the 1970s. Amazing!