By Julie Shimon
When you are nine years old receiving mail is always
exciting; perhaps even more so when it’s a highly anticipated postcard,
handmade, and coming to you from an unexpected friend in Russia. There is a really great story behind Jack's
most recent mail delivery. Last summer Jack wrote a story about a lecture on Nasutuceratops titusi. Of all the
images available online of this interesting dinosaur his favorite was one
created by Andrey Atuchin, an artist in Russia.
We sought permission to use his artwork and then weeks later Jack was
back on email to Andrey asking permission to interview about his profession.
That
interview became one of Jack’s favorite writing projects ever. Not only did he
learn about a very interesting job—natural history illustrator—but he also got
a glimpse into the life of Andrey and his family in Russia. Since the interview
we have remained in touch and the opportunity came up again to work on a
project together. Jack’s school is doing
a project to collect postcards from different states and countries. We asked
Andrey if he’d like to do a postcard trade. For our part, it was simple to find
some fun postcards of Colorado landmarks and write notes and draw pictures
(Jack’s sister) and send them to Russia.
Andrey, however, was a great sport when he replied that he’d love to
trade postcards but since he couldn’t get one in Kemerovo he was going to make
one for Jack!!
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| Colorado Springs Mineralogical Society Pebble Pup Jack Shimon displaying his postcard from his paleontologist friend who lives in Siberia, Russia. The card is from Andrey Atuchin who is also a paleo artist. |
As you can
imagine, this was one piece of mail we couldn’t wait for. Andrey said it took two weeks for the
delivery to arrive from Moscow for him to get started. That delivery was a
beautiful photo of a snowy Siberia, taken by a photographer friend of Andrey’s
who lives near Baikal Lake in Siberia.
The other side of the card contains Andrey’s original artwork. When
Andrey emailed that his postcard was in the mail to Jack we settled in to be
patient. Little did we know that while
it took two weeks for the photo to travel within Siberia it only took one week
from it to go from Moscow, across the ocean, and into our mailbox!!
