A physicist with more than 40 patents to his credit would seem to have his career clearly mapped out. But Robert J. Lang’s first love is…folding paper. One of the world’s foremost artists in origami—Japanese paper folding—Lang creates creatures of such realism and complexity that it seems impossible that each is composed of a single sheet of paper, no cuts, no glue.

Inspecting Lang’s eight-inch-tall ibex, for instance, you can see its beard, ears, horns, even its cloven hooves. His grizzly bear has teeth. His insects—Lang’s favorites—have fat bodies, twiggy legs, antennae, sometimes even spread wings.

And some of Lang’s origami creations are life size, like his eight-piece orchestra commissioned by a European paper company, or the Pteranodon with a 14-foot wing span created from a single, four-meter-square piece of paper. It flies on permanent display at the Redpath Museum of Natural History in Montreal, Canada.

Perhaps Lang’s most elaborate commercial origami assignment was creating an entire landscape for a Mitsubishi commercial. He, colleague Linda Tomoko Mihara, and a small team of model-makers folded mountains, clouds, wheat, several hundred trees—lacy trees so people could peer through the branches—tree bark, cobblestones, eight-foot-tall skyscrapers, Victorian homes, simple and complex leaves, several dogs, a deer, perching birds, flying birds and a dragon.

“In just the last 50 years, we’ve seen the number of published origami design grow from about 100 to more than 36,000, says Lang. “And in origami, we’re nowhere near the limits of what’s possible…”