There are actually some fossils of dinosaur mummies, a rare preservation of a rare preservation. For some species these give us direct evidence of their physical appearance beyond their bone structure.
dinosaur mummies
6 year old me would've been scared shitless with this information
Imagine Brendan Fraser fighting some of these fuckers, fuck the third Mummy movie set in China give me Brendan Fraser getting his ass kicked in North Dakota because he unearthed some dinosaur mummy at Hell Creek.
So tired of this meme, especially in a science themed sub. It's just wrong and thusly promotes disinformation because it takes seconds to read a meme like this and move on without question. Meanwhile it takes (comparitavely) ages to actually research how fossils are reconstructed. If people even think to research it in the first place, because, hey, it's in a science-based sub, right??
Remember kids, the best memes are those based on truth 😎
ok, but can we make fun of old "skin wrapping" reconstructions?
because for most people, Jurassic park are still their standard version of dinosaur reconstitution.
are they actually just lizards?
How do you mean? Dinosaurs? They were warmblooded, so no, not just lizards. Usually in the rock around the fossilized bones are imprints of other features of the animal, like skin texture or the presence of feathers.
We can also tell a lot from the points where muscles attach to the bones.
That's not even accounting for the behavior we can interpret based on fossilized footprints! We're actually learning that T-Rex were pretty good parents for instance.
It's a very complex field, and it's amazing how much we can learn from so few clues.
This is actually doing a disservice to all the work paleontologists do in reconstructing. There was indeed a time where there was too much stretching over bones, but this is something they are now very aware of. Also keep in mind reptiles, avians and and mammals have a very different relationship between bones and body. It's mainly mammals that tend to add a lot of bulk like that.
Well, a plucked bird does look pretty different. Then again, fossilized feathers for dinosaurs have been found, so it's not like we're completely blind to that, either.
Honestly I think we need to do more blame to the general popular media. AKA while the actual real science has moved so much further forward. Most people will complain and hate it if their dinosaur renditions don't match what has been set in stone in their minds by Jurrasic Park. Hence feathers are in the minority of renditions of dinosaurs for the mainstream public.
The scientific renditions are pretty accurate. The current movies, books, toys, cartoons, etc... on the other hand are all stuck on a modified for creative and practical reproduction variant of the version that science had in the 80s.
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.
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.
Yeah, this is why people don't trust science. They look at the surface level of the PRESS RELEASE and then assume scientists are just making shit up.
There's a ton of work done behind the pictures and there's lots of revisions and changes as new evidence comes in. AND there is disclaimers on ever single "artist rendition"
Science is fucking hard, and the pretty pictures of the press release are just the fun parts that they use to advertise their hard work.
Then people take a brief look at the picture, call bullshit, then go smear them online.
People fail to distinguish between popular science and actual science. Popular science is mostly about communicating recent discoveries to the general public, preferably in some entertaining way. Actual science as it’s communicated is really hard for the general public to understand.
Just because popular science often gets it wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that actual science has gotten it wrong.
Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won't print a "We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur", but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it's truthful or just purely made up.
Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.
That's why the fake "chocolate helps you loose weight" study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn't expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)
Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there's a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.
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.
There is a book discussing that.
This website has a few examples: https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2020/09/16/all-todays.html?hl=en-US
Yeah, that's my source, thanks for googleing that.
I'm not educated enough in the field to come up with a critique like that on my own ;)
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 want to live on that planet. It can't possibly be doing worse than we are.
Wake up babe, they just renamed the Platapudactilisaurus
Relevant. https://youtu.be/xaQJbozY_Is
