This early and rarely seen Robert Smithson painting from the 1960s depicts a fantastical landscapes embedded with geological thinking and science fiction. Beneath a black sky, a pink landscape emerges through energetic painted lines that extends upward through two tall palm trees. Drawing on Smithson’s childhood interests in natural history museums, his works from this period show evolving amphibians, dinosaurs, and scientific notation in imagined prehistoric landscapes. For Smithson, landscape and its inhabitants were always undergoing change. He proposed a vision of time and history as mutable and subjective. These works encapsulate Smithson’s exploration of, as he said in 1972, the “origins and primordial beginnings, […] the archetypal nature of things.”