Élisabeth Daynès

Élisabeth Daynès (Béziers, 1960-) is a French sculptor. In 1981 she worked with the Théâtre de la Salamandre in Lille creating masks for the theatre.

In 1984, she founded her own studio, Atelier Daynès, in Paris. Some years later, the Thot Museum in Montignac, close to the Lascaux caves, asked her to sculpt a life size woolly Mammoth with a group of hominids. She has since specialized in reconstructing hominids from remaining bones. Her work is present at museums all over the world, like Musée des Merveilles in Tende, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, Sangiran Museum in Indonesia, Naturhistoriska riksmuseet in Stockholm and Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos (Spain). One of her most notable sculptures is at the Krapina Neanderthal Museum in northern Croatia where she made a reconstruction of an entire seventeen member Neanderthal family. In 2005 she created a life like model of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in a project with National Geographic. A close resemblance with the real Pharaoh is likely, even though traits like ears, nose tip, and color of skin and eyes cannot be reliably reconstructed.

In 2010 Daynes won the John J. Lazendorf Paleoart prize, widely regarded as the most prestigious reward given to artists in science art related to paleontology, in the 3-Dimensional Art category.