Museums :
- Cleveland Museum of Natural History, U.S. Park Services Wayside Museums
- National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution : full scale dioramas and series of six large museum murals showing successive fossil mammal faunas of the Tertiary and Pleistocene.
- American Museum of Natural History of New York : two murals, one is a 20 ft long tableau showing five successive evolutionary stages of fossil primates.
- Gunma Prefecture Museum in Japan : two murals of fossil human activities.

Book and periodical illustration :
- National Geographic Magazine
- National Geographic Society Special Publications Books
- World Book
- Time/Life Nature Library books
and many documentary television productions.

Many travels to obtain authentic background material and to study actual specimens : United States, Western Canada, Alaska, Colombia, Panama, Africa, U.K., France and Spain.

Favorite subjects and artistic specialty
Primates, fossil prehumans and archaic man.

Collaboration with many eminent scientists in these endeavours :
Ian Tattersall, T.Dale Stewart, F. Clark Howell, T.D. White, Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey, among others.
From1968 until her death, Jay Matternes was a close friend of Dian Fossey visiting her camp in Rwanda in 1968 and 1974 to observe wild mountain gorillas.

Gallery art
Jay Matternes' paintings have been represented by galleries in New York, Denver, and Annapolis.