The designers’ mesmerizing illustrations, and their impact on popular culture then and now, is the focus of the Drawing Center’s exhibition Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions, which ends this month. DTR illustrators—some of whom were also scientists—would perch in tropical forests with drawing papers in their laps or even strap zinc tablets to their swimsuits to sketch sea creatures. Some would make tiny specimens in jars come to outsized life, while others would paint in real time as Beebe and his colleagues recounted what they saw from hundreds of feet under the water.

In the Drawing Center’s galleries, you become an explorer of the DTR’s precise but fantastical depictions of highly expressive land and marine creatures. The anthropomorphism often reaches humorous and occasionally terrifying levels, the kind that’s everywhere in popular culture now, from animated features like Moana to TV shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty to toys like the Jurassic World Lego set.

Many of the DTR’s creations would be at home in a sci-fi summer blockbuster, transcending the pompous-seeming gravity of the scientific establishment as Beebe wished. The DTR artist Isabel Cooper’s bright watercolor Green Parrot Fish (Noma Expedition, 1923) wears a vain look, seemingly proud of its psychedelic complexion, which dissolves into gradients of watermelon pink, algae green, sea blue, and neon yellow. To its left in the exhibition, Cooper’s shy, crooked-smiled, and slightly plump Moray Eel (Arcturus Expedition, 1925) sits timidly next to Else Bostelmann’s frighteningly toothy Saber-toothed Viper Fish (Bermuda, 1934), its eyes glowing against a stark black background.

The sea monsters continue throughout Exploratory Works, from mammoth-lipped species that resemble dogs to a radiant-orange giant squid, arching forward to find its prey. Bostelmann’s motley array of cuddly and creepy deep-sea creatures in her watercolor, Big Bad Wolves of an Abyssal Chamber of Horrors (1934), might make you laugh and cringe at once: They’re all staring straight at the viewer, as if their noses are pressed up against glass.

On the other side of the room, which is dedicated to birds, insects, and land animals, you come face to face with George Swanson’s Big-Eyed Climbing Snake (Venezuela, 1945), a somewhat befuddled-looking entity, and Cooper’s Margay Tigrina Vigens, (British Guiana, 1925), a watercolor tiger of earthy orange tones who appears paused in deep thought.

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Particularly in the underwater work, it’s hard to believe these images—further enlivened by the DTR’s animated black-and-white movies of fanged fish, vapor-shooting shrimp, and transforming tadpoles—were real. Many other scientists of the day were similarly suspicious of the creatures’ authenticity. The DTR artists’ theatrical portrayal of these (very real) exotic animals and their environments rippled through the popular and creative consciousness in the early 20th century. Of course, so too did the unprecedented deep-sea dives themselves, which gripped the country the way the space program would a generation later.