This is an intricately designed large seedpot by Jennifer Tafoya.    She is known for her clay vessels and also her amazing animal figures and for this show, they are animals from the “Ice Age”!  This piece is fully polished and fully designed.  It has a “Terror Bird” realistically etched into the top of the piece. The detail, color, and realism of the bird is spectacular. It’s not just the bird, but the clouds in the background, and the surrounding designs that add to the impact of the piece.  I could almost say it is like a “painting in clay”.  Note the traditional style rainclouds at the top of the piece.  I had a stand made for it as it allows it to be seen with a more dramatic appearance.  Jennifer continues to not just be creative in design, but in technique.  All the various colors are derived from natural clay slips.  The piece is signed on the bottom in the clay, “Jennifer Tafoya”.

Phorusrhacids or Terror birds are an extinct clade of large carnivorous flightless birds that were one of the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era.  Their descendants made their way into North America.  The closely related bathornithids occupied a similar ecological niche in North America across the Eocene to Early Miocene.  Racing across the plains of Argentina were strange feathery shapes, taller than a man. They pecked their prey to death with hooked beaks mounted on heads as big as that of a horse’s. These were the terror birds, the dominant predators of their day and age.

They were the only line of carnivorous flightless birds ever, and they embodied the power and ferocity of their predatory dinosaur relatives before them. Called phorusrhacids, these birds dominated South America, ruling over a fauna made up of primitive mammalian herbivores and rather small carnivorous mammals. These creatures are known in popular culture as the terror birds, a name that is well deserved.