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Fossils are more than just bone in many cases, and study of bones can reveal what they were. Example is that T. rex had lips. How would they know that? By looking at the teeth and how they wear down compared to other animals like alligators, etc.
You can also see where the lip muscles attach to the jaw.
The memes that our current Dino images are wrong are very outdated. Our images are probably surprisingly close to reality.
Why don’t you want us to have weird dinosaurs?
There are plenty of weird dinos. Just as there are plenty bonkers contemporary animals. Nature is wild :D
Example is that T. rex had lips.
Just looking at the skeleton, we would reconstruct a lot of thing wrong.
Camel:
Platypus:
Seal:
Elephant:
This seems like a fun way to create new creatures. Take existing skeletons and just try to plop on flesh in unique ways.
This was already done in “All Todays,” which features depictions of modern animals as distant-future paleontologists might reconstruct them, given just skeletal remains.
Example of Elephant, Zebra, and Rhino:
‘All Todays’ Explained - https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2020/09/16/all-todays.html
Thank you for sharing this. It’s interesting.
I still think T-rex was a big chonky birb.
You should see the schnozes they’re sticking on hadrosaurs these days.
https://earthsky.org/earth/juvenile-hadrosaur-fossil-reveals-fleshy-snout/
Wake up babe, they just renamed the Platapudactilisaurus
There’s a website (can’t be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It’s ridiculous.
That’s why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.
Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.
At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.
I don’t think you can prove that people can’t do something well, by doing it yourself poorly.
“Look how humorously badly I keep missing the target! See? Sharpshooters could never hit something like this at this distance!”
Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.
Remember the “chocolate helps you lose weight” study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher’s name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.
Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn’t expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.
Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.
