Centuries-Old Paintings Are Revealing Real Biology Scientists Only Confirmed Decades Later

In the corner of his 1611 painting "Air," Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder drew a bat holding a songbird in its jaws. The behavior was real, but scientists would not officially confirm it for another 400 years. Pedro Romero-Vidal, an ecologist at Donana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, identified the animal as a greater noctule bat, a species that mainly eats insects. Researchers only documented evidence of the bats snatching birds from fecal remains in the early 2000s, and confirmed the behavior by listening to the bats eating songbirds in 2025. Romero-Vidal published the painting analysis this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Romero-Vidal and colleagues have been scanning historic paintings for depictions of monkeys and parrots, animals often transported from distant places, because repeated appearances can reveal what artists and their audiences knew about them. The team has identified more than 1,500 such works.

Other artists captured ecological knowledge ahead of science too. German-born artist Maria Sibylla Merian, active in the late 1600s and early 1700s, painted detailed still lifes that matched insects with their specific host plants -- work that later influenced Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. "She was a scientist ahead of her time," said art historian Anna Knaap of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

While preparing a 2025 exhibition on artist Rachel Ruysch, who was active in the same period, Knaap and fellow historian Christopher Atkins asked Harvard University biologist Charles Davis to examine her botanical accuracy. Davis found that Ruysch painted flower parts such as sepals and anthers precisely enough to identify specific species and their origin in Dutch colonial territories. He also spotted a mistake: one painting showed a swallowtail butterfly visiting a carrion flower, which in nature attracts flies as pollinators, not butterflies. Ruysch had likely only seen the flower in a botanical garden, without its usual pollinator present.

Art historians use several tools to judge whether an artist depicted something realistically, including comparing repeated motifs across an artist's body of work and checking original sketches against finished paintings.