“They know it’s a mirror,” he said of the zoo’s gorilla family. “They come up, make faces, check out their teeth. I’ve gotten some really great shots.”

His interest in gorilla grimaces, like his interest in displays of dissected flesh, is professional. Mr. Deak, 32, is one of the world’s leading paleoartists. If you find yourself face to face in a museum with Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei, you may be looking at his work.

Many of the images of hominids in the new Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History are his, as are those in the book “The Last Human,” both of which he did in collaboration with Gary J. Sawyer, the museum’s physical anthropologist.

(Much of Mr. Deak’s work can be seen on his Web site, www.anatomicalorigins.com.)

His 78-foot-long mural showing six million years’ worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as part of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy.” The exhibit’s centerpiece is the fossilized skeleton of Lucy  three million years old, less than four feet tall, hailing from the Afar Depression of Ethiopia and named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which was playing in the camp when she was found in 1974.

But his mural, a vast Photoshop collage, is more fun to ponder than the bones. The background uses thousands of his photos of vegetation, rocks, valleys and outcrops from the South Dakota badlands, the Puerto Rican jungle and the Wyoming prairie. Only one speck of it, a friend’s mother’s safari shot of faraway thorn trees, was actually snapped in Africa. But Ethiopia today, of course, no longer has the lush rainforest and grassy savannah of Ethiopia three million years ago, so Mr. Deak had to improvise. His landscape is filled with ape-men morphed from photos of his sculpted heads overlaid with photos of chimpanzee hair like a late-night hair restoration commercial, each one set atop the body of a human  usually Mr. Deak, his wife, or friends  in a primeval pose, then further adjusted to have longer arms, jutting buttocks or whatever is accurate.