High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rudolph Franz Zallinger (born November 12, 1919 - August 1, 1995) was an American-based artist notable for his mural The Age of Reptiles (1947) at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History and for the popular illustration known as March of Progress (1965), one of the world's most recognizable scientific images. Zallinger was born in Irkutsk, Siberia in 1919. He attended Yale's School of Fine Arts on scholarships during the Depression, was trained as an illustrator, and he taught there after graduation. The Peabody hired him to paint the mural in 1943 at $40 a week, and Zallinger took a crash course in paleontology to prepare for the job. After that, the museum appointed him as the artist in residence , a position he held until his death.