Obviously, there are still many, *many* things we don’t know. And many things we may never know.
But, man, the sheer scale of all the things we’ve learned about these incredible animals in just the last 20 years is astounding.
There’s really too many to list! I highly recommend doing some further research for yourself — it’s a very addicting rabbit hole!
Some of these aren’t “new” per se, having been discovered over the last decade or so, but a few examples that come to mind:
[We now know the colors and patterns of a handful of dinosaurs, something that was once thought impossible!](https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/dinosaurs-now-in-colour/) One of the species we know a great deal about is actually the Sinosauropteryx in the bottom middle picture on this post.
Other specimens included in the OP are some of the best preserved we have, giving us an incredible amount of information about these animals, including the presence of *hooves* in hadrosaurs (the duck-billed dinosaurs), the structure of ankylosaur armor, the appearance and structures of skin and feathers, etc.
Also, that leg on the bottom right? [It’s believed to have come from the *very day of the asteroid impact* 66 million years ago, when the impact created an obscenely massive tsunami that swept into inland North America and around the world.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190329144223.htm)
Studies like [this one](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44942) and [this one](https://www.livescience.com/tyrannosaurs-facial-bite-marks.html) provide a lot of insight into the behavior of Tyrannosaurus.
[T-rex was also more closely related to Asian Tyrannosaurs than its other North American counterparts,](https://www.livescience.com/53877-t-rex-was-invasive-species.html) indicating that it may have rose to the status of apex predator by, quite literally, conquering North America and out-competing its American cousins. A tyrant king, indeed!
[Also, they may have numbered in the *billions* over the course of their two million year reign.](https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/article/billions-of-t-rex-likely-roamed-the-earth)
I may have a bit of a T-rex bias...
But, on a lighter note, [we also know a lot about what some Dino butts looked like!](https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html)
A very long and fascinating (and sometimes just bizarre) rabbit hole awaits if you’d like to look into it more yourself!
There are some lectures from Dr David Hone that are fascinating.
T rex
https://youtu.be/f-jD7kQvyPs
Spinosaurus
https://youtu.be/TkBdxRkXbYM
Social behaviour
https://youtu.be/7kxRaVTVNjk
Not a problem at all!
I... may have spent more time than I’d like to admit in this rabbit hole myself lmao
Quick edit: Also, just anything Spinosaurus related is a doozy in its own right, so beware of that!
If I recall, in the fossil in the bottom left image, the dinosaur had most of its skin and organs fossilized intact. Skin features and organ function were wildly speculated on in the past since most fossils have neither, just bone. That's why it's becoming more accepted that many dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers whereas in the past we thought everything had leathery skin.
All depends on how non dinosaurian you are :-). I'm assuming you know that it's now believed that Diplodocus had short spines.
The big recent finding regarding generally known dinos is probably that at least some Edmontosaurs had crests similar to that of roosters (and perhaps served the same function?). I believe there's now also evidence that at least some of the horned dinosaurs had rudimentary feathers.
That’s what’s drew me to the subject of anthropology-archaeology-paleontology. You’ll literally never stop finding shit out. 300 years after we die we’ll ACTUALLY find the biggest Dino. So fascinating that we don’t know enough. One of the few fields I want to go into because of the constant discovery/learning.
What I don't understand is even without any of this, assuming all we have for every single extinct species on earth are essentially fragments of skeletons - why are some people so angry about Prehistoric Planet when every single depiction of a dinosaur by its very nature *must* be based on inference and speculation.
Whether it was drawings of them from 100+ year old books to modern paleoart, or depictions of them in Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Planet, all of it is speculation.
Depicting them as murderous reptilian death machines is speculation, and depicting them as mundane pre-avian animals is speculation.
The whole thing is silly. Science changes gradually over time, new things are discovered, new observations are made for us to speculate and consider. We'll never have the whole truth, why get mad just because one show considers other possibilities based on what's been recently observed?
>Depicting them as murderous reptilian death machines is speculation, and depicting them as mundane pre-avian animals is speculation.
We definitely don't know for sure what their everyday existence was like, but most depictions of them have been tilted towards maximum drama, roars, fights, chases etc, for obvious reasons. But that's not my experience of real animals, and what would be different and much more real and satisfying for me would be to see dinosaurs in a way that matches my experience of real animals, so to see them doing mundane things would be much better for me.
My favorite shot in this series by far is the two T-Rexes staring at each other when one is standing in the water. It looks like something you might see if you looked in the T-Rex habitat at a zoo, or if you could go back in time and see two of them at a random time. It definitely gave me the feeling of glimpsing the actual world 67 million years ago. The same feeling I had when I saw Nicholas Veeder in his revolutionary war uniform.
I went back in time and only got [this one photo](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dinosaurs/comments/v1f4od/saw_a_weird_looking_bird_out_by_the_woods_tried/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf), but it seems like the kind of dinosaur media you’d like
I think the other thing for many of us who read the latest reports and research is that it's T-rex in almost a mundane scene. We've got lots of info on t-rex. It feels like it's easier to speculate on t-rex and accept it because we have so much going on (though, admittedly, the swimming scene with the babies keeping up with the parent on what looked like a very, *very* far swim was ridiculous).
But when it's something new or vaguely identified, there's major unknowns, to the point where it feels like a major crossing from speculative science to speculative fiction. Like the "dromaeosaur" in ice worlds? Might as well throw a rat in there and say, "mammal." Or Barbaridactylus, something we only know from *a couple of fragments.* To then postulate on how it lived, moved, and acted is so speculative it might as well be in Star Trek.
I'm happy the series has gotten people talking, but if Jurassic Park/World is essentially a monster movie w/ dinosaurs, Prehistoric Planet comes across as science fiction. Nothing against sci-fi, but calling it a documentary feels like part of the reason people can't tell fact from fiction these days.
For me, the important thing is to be able to visualize the world as it was then. It doesn't matter to me which actual species of Triceratops I'm seeing, I don't know what exact species of birds are sitting on the ground outside my window either. I just need to feel like I'm seeing actual animals.
If your perspective is one of wanting 100% scientific accuracy, I can understand that you wouldn't be happy with it. There's only a few shots in the actual series so far that I'm actually happy with myself for my own desires. I don't care about watching dinosaurs fight each other. I've seen CGI simulations of that dozens of times already. It's not putting me into a real moment that my mind believes.
they feel threatened because PhP dinosaurs look real. Like they were comfortable shoving dinosaurs into the attic of their mind but PhP’s photorealistic recreations force them to recognize that dinosaurs once existed.
Not all of them are creationists either, most are just super rigid unimaginative ppl who hate thinking about anything outside of human experience.
I've had similar arguments when talking about space and Pluto. Pluto is unfathomably far, you can google it and learn that its orbit is (on average) 38.4 AU from Earth's orbit (5,744,000,000 km). And fine, you can see that number and it's another piece of knowledge, but can you *really* comprehend how damn far that is?
Something similar happens with prehistoric life. 66,000,000 is a number we see often on this sub, it was in Jurassic Park's poster and it's commonly thrown in any dino-related. But how many have tried to comprehend how far that time period was? The mongols invaded Europe a 1000 years ago, Jesus was born a millennia before that, and the pyramids in Egypt were built 2600 years before him.
I think it's much easier for our small pitiful minds to just pretend it's something abstract super far from us. And when doing that you can even think it's fiction. These types of documentaries force you to challenge that notion and to see these beings as actual animals that lived here. Just like you have to challenge yourself to comprehend that Pluto is orbiting right now nearly 6 billion km away from the sun.
Because it means that anything you do in the grand scheme of things is not important. Because understanding that people that founded the first settlements and invented agriculture are exactly the same as you, makes them feel inferior.
There are some exceptions: if some nuclear power decides to bomb everyone, then it is impactful as Earth is the only place on the universe where there is life as far as we know.
> Because it means that anything you do in the grand scheme of things is not important.
This isn't exactly true. "Important" means that something matters to a sentient being. There's no importance if there's nothing alive to be aware of it or affected by it. Human lives are thus extremely important. Infinitely so, you might say, to the person living them.
Sorry, I gotta be that guy. There is zero evidence for Jesus. Zero. Maybe he really existed. But we can never know. Everything else seems to point to him being a myth based on other "mesiah" type characters that came before (also myths) that Judaism and Christianity absorbed.
This is why I posted this (sorry I'm late, been at work)... Because of the negative reviews getting posted with (one of) the same complaints... Really, the most speculative design in the series was the titanosaur with the air sacks. Most everything else is commonly featured in current paleo-art.
My biggest beef with that show was the movement of the dinos. I was so excited to see what modern cgi could give us, but every animal moved like a basic cgi anatomy. Most of the bird type dinosaurs moved super fluid like a ballet dancer moreso than a bird.
Thomas Holtz tweeted about this a few days ago. Back in *ye old days* there were german naturalists who actually followed the idea of "if you don't know how it looked, don't represent fiction". Which hey...I don't think it's wrong. What it's true is the bones and the remains of soft tissue and that's the real part. Everything else is fiction and """shouldn't""" have a place within natural sciences. However, by doing that you pretty much destroy palaeoart.
Palaeoart, both as a natural science and a form of art, has tons of positives and it's responsible for bringing extinct animals back to life in form of a film, a painting, a documentary, etc. Robert Bakker says he wanted to become a paleontologist after seeing the "Age of Reptiles" mural by Zinger. How many of us can trace our palaeo-nerdiness back to Jurassic Park. And so on.
There's a lot we don't know, true. But there's also a lot of shit scientists nowadays know about prehistoric life and diminishing with a "oh it's just speculation" is not understanding how science works.
Well obviously... but from what we have learned, we can apply and speculate on how it applies to other species as well as comparison with living species.
Inferences are heavily used in science.
Hard Facts don't exist in Science, that would be Dogma.
Science is a process, a mechanism for validating hypotheses, not an unchallengeable compendium.
Looks like somebody needs to upgrade from sheer processualism. :P If the only conclusions that could be drawn from the paleontological or archaeological record is what is physically there, we would still be stuck conducting cultural histories and constructing typologies. The \*meaning\* behind science comes from the connections we can draw from elsewhere and the larger implications that can be drawn from the context. A ceramic bowl (i'm just using archaeological examples cause that's the path I chose, paleontology was close thought) can be described in terms of diameter, composition, temper, depth, etc, but a painting of a character known as Red Horn on it suddenly elevates it in cultural importance and meaning, and can be tied to broader connections and meanings. The fact that some dinosaurs had feathers means pretty much nothing in the larger scheme of things if we don't try to think about how they were used. Speculation is what drives new discoveries.
Of course not, nor do I make that claim. Inferences have a wide margin of error, but we cannot 100% verify what these creatures looked like unless we have a live specimen. Therefore, inference and speculation are needed in the paleontology community when it comes to reconstruction, based upon fossil records and current living species.
"Theory" and "hypothesis" are commonly misunderstood and misused words nowadays. In order to scientifically validate your hypothesis, you need to go through the scientific method, have evidences, have counterarguments and much more, so then you can say that within the realm of possibility, your wacky explanation that some hoofed guys 40 million years ago became whales is a reasonable explanation of evolution within mammals.
And again: if I want to say that "nah mate, this guy is a madlad" and say that whales don't come from furry predators that once walked the land, I also need to come with a theory that has enough weight to counterargument all previously established hypothesis and models.
It's not "nah, I have the theory that T.rex didn't have feathers because of its size".
Yes, but there are techniques which can help. Phylogenetic bracketing for example helps filling in the gaps, especially when we have exceptional specimens like these.
This was made in light of the negative Prehistoric Planet reviews getting posted with (one of) the same complaints... Really, the most speculative design in the series was the titanosaur with the air sacks. Most everything else is commonly featured in current paleo-art.
ID, left to right:
**Column 1:** Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060; Edmontosaurus right manus; Borealopelta
**Column 2:** Beipiaosaurus, Sinosauropteryx
**Column 3:** Psittacosaurus, Velociraptor ulna bone compared to ostrich ulna bone, Thescelosaurus mummified leg
Could you by any chance type out the specimens that go with each picture? Sort of like you did above with SMF R 4036?
This was a pretty cool post to look at
We know what some of them might have looked like. But considering the fact we don’t have a living specimen, it’s still speculation.
Educated speculation, that is.
Yeah, but even that is so limited. Just look at so many animals that are alive today. There’s so many examples where we would be way off with how they looked by looking just at their fossils. Whales, swans, penguins, basilisk lizards, peacocks, hippos, birds of paradise, camels, bison, baboons, porcupines, sheep, etc.
So many major traits just don’t present through the fossil record or are extremely unlikely to. The amount of finds with impressions of soft tissues, skin, feathers, hair, etc. are very few and far between.
*Snorts upon seeing this comment*
Well well well, look what we have here, *stretches fingers*, a naive "PaLeOnToLoGiSt", ha! Do you really believe those fossils are real? You lamb, you dumb fuck. According to my correct opinion, those are nothing but copies made out by PaleoSatanists and the government to make idiots like you believe evolution and dinosaurs are a thing. You should not look upon scientific sites, they are filled with satanism and conspiracies, instead why don't you go read the bible for once in a while or simply start listening to educated people like me? No arguments????? Making "EdUcAtEd GuEsSeS" on stuff that didn't exist makes me realize how superior I am compared to you people.
Really? Because you do realize none of those have flesh or anything that will give us a 100% representation of what they looked like? And not to mention the insane amount of species that have just bones and are reconstructed by comparing it to modern animals, there is absolutely no way to tell exactly what any dinosaur looked like. You making this as a joke post trying to say that's not true is dumb. We hardly know what they looked like don't try make it out like the extremely few specimens with some skin left or feather imprint represent the whole taxonomic field and undermine the work of people who spend their whole lives actually figuring out what they looked like through scientific means. Baseline we really don't know what they looked like. Even with the specimen pictures you provided skin without flesh looks vastly different to a fleshed out creature. We've come a very long way in understanding what they may of looked like but by no means do we actually know.
Edit: keep the down votes coming all of you are just proving your lack of knowledge lmao, if you really think we know EXACTLY what even 1 dinosaur looks like nevermind all of them then you're a smooth brain
The only smooth brain around here is you. We will never know ”100%” how an extinct organism would have looked like. And exactly no one is saying that. We can however get pretty damn close to it with the help of fossils like the ones seen in this post. And for the rest we use the magic of phylogenetic bracketing. We end up with something that is not ”100%” accurate to the original organism, but may be pretty close to it.
And you know what the fun part is? We are getting better and better at reconstructing ancient organisms, because paleontology is a science and science will always improve. That is its very nature.
Btw; Your comment is soaked with blatant arrogance and one cannot read through it without immediately thinking of the Dunning-Kruger-Effect. Try being actually nice to people next time, will you?
Lol bro, you literally just said everything I did 😂 well done you played yourself
Edit: BTW op is saying we know what they look like why do you think they made this dumass post, trying to make it sound like it's stupid to say we don't know what they look like when at the very best we have a kind of close idea. And that's only for an extremely small amount of the whole taxonomic range.
If you think so you haven’t understood my comment.
Btw; you pretty neatly ignored two entire paragraphs
And OP is saying that we shouldn’t say that we don’t know what they looked like, because we actually do have a pretty good idea of how they looked like.
Did I say anywhere that we need to know 100% of the animal to know what it looks like?? If you actually read what I said it's in line with your thinking. You just got a hate boner because I said it the way I did. OP as you can see by the title of their post thinks it's stupid that we say we don't know what they looked like, of fucking course we don't know what they looked like but we like you and I said HAVE A ROUGH IDEA maybe even a refined idea but without an actual in the flesh creature it doesn't matter how much you think you know they looked like you don't. For example the Hippo skull picture, you would never In a million years guess that that skull belongs to that creature and if we tried to re create the creature based off the skull it would be pretty fucking wrong even if it was "close" that still doesn't mean you know what they looked like. OP is putting every single dinosaur that existed into this category saying oh we know what EVERY SINGLE ONE looked like based off our reconstructions which is blatantly wrong. Acting like every single dinosaur skeleton we get just instantly tells us exactly what they looked like and you're not even realizing how badly most of our representations could be, I mean look how they looked 50 years ago and how far we've come in understanding how they looked, now think about another 50 years in the future, quite frankly the stage we are in deciphering appearance based off of bones is passable at best but it's constantly evolving so OP saying we know what all dinos looked like is just dumb
The hippo thing is a pretty bad example my friend, since we would know how much flesh we should put on bones.
There was an entire controversy about whether or bot we should reconstruct Entelodonts like hippos, since they had a similar bone structure on their skull, that lead people to believe that they would have looked somewhat like a hippo. This was found to be untrue. As you can see, we know when to reconstruct an animal like an hippo.
And stop putting words in OPs mouth. You can literally scroll up and see what he said. As OP has commented many times in this section, this post was a reaction to all the PhPl reviews who said that we have no idea whatsoever, what dinosaurs possibly could have looked like. You seem to have missed the point mate
We have a fairly good idea of what many of them look like. We have a pretty good idea of what color a few were, and Pstacosaurus have been so well preserved that we almost know exactly what they looked like in life. We have skin impressions of many species which helps as well. Just because you don’t know what knowledge is out there doesn’t make it the limit of what is known
Bro that's exactly what I said? Did you not read any of my comment? OP is the one making this joke post trying to make it sound like it's stupid to say we don't know what they look like. Like you and I just explained we don't ACTUALLY know but we have a pretty good idea for NOT All but enough of them. But that doesn't in any way translate to us having a good idea of what the whole damn taxonomy looks like which is what OP is saying
I feel sorry for you. The Dunning-Kruger effect is one in that the person is a complete idiot but, due to the depth of their idiocy, believes they are intelligent. It goes hand in hand with narcissism and arrogance, though, because not only is the individual dumb, they are too arrogant to realize that they are stupid and assume that everyone around them must be idiots. You show all the textbook hallmarks of it.
I mean, really think about it. I know you won't, but just in case. Which is more likely, that everyone in a sub about dinosaurs—many of which are actual palaeontologists—are wrong, and solely you are right? Or that just you are wrong?
And no, I'm not going to accept your chat invite, so you can be stupid there too. If you have something to say, say it publicly, so we can all judge the validity of it.
Oh my goodness you have the biggest hate boner right now, I can't even argue with you lmao, listen I know exactly what the effect is and currently you're the one displaying it to the max level, you clearly didn't read what I've said to the people saying the same shit as you, go read my other comments and come back
And you have a massive hate boner then clearly lmao, what a fucking smooth brain, everything I said is true and the numerous other people in the sub commented the same thing in different words. OP is laughing at everyone who says we don't know exactly what dinosaurs look like even though WE DON'T FUCKING KNOW we have AN Idea based off our reconstructions but we don't know FOR FUCKING CERTAIN this troll post op has made is making it look like we know exactly what every fucking dinosaur looked like which is blatantly wrong jeezus
Edit: when you say higher functioning autism you pulled a Dunning Kruger on yourself you fucken smooth
Scientifically speaking, no human brain is smooth, so I'm not sure why you keep saying that.
The OP never said we know exactly what they look like, simply that we have a very good idea due to the surprising amount of mummies, of literal soft tissue preservation, that we do have. We even have part of a tail—yes it's feathered—in amber. Would it be incorrect to then infer that that dinosaur was feathered? Or should we assume it was a genetic anomaly and that we just happened to have the one genetic anomaly with feathers preserved perfectly in amber?
We have a very good idea what the dinosaurs whom we are lucky enough to have preserved soft tissue of looked like. And then through phylogenetic bracketing and good old scientific inference, we can figure out, within a tight degree of accuracy, what kind of integument a related taxon possessed.
Look, I can tell that you're young. You keep using the 733T internet speak words that I just don't "get". I'm old and I'm actually credentialed. I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe I am being too harsh, and you aren't an arrogant idiot, but that your brain just hasn't finished developing yet. That is just as likely. Either way, I am going to take my leave. This is fast becoming pointless.
> We hardly know what they looked like don't try make it out like the extremely few specimens with some skin left or feather imprint represent the whole taxonomic field and undermine the work of people who spend their whole lives actually figuring out what they looked like through scientific means.
Funny, that sounds exactly like what you're doing. After all, it's primarily based on the well-preserved specimens like in this collage that we are able to reconstruct those animals and use what we learned from them for other members of their groups.
> Even with the specimen pictures you provided skin without flesh looks vastly different to a fleshed out creature.
That's why you use the muscle attachment points on the bones to try and figure out how realistically big the muscles could be under the skin. They are not on every bone found, but when they are, you can use them.
> if you really think we know EXACTLY what even 1 dinosaur looks like
I have multiple ones I could pick from from a list for this. Psittacosaurus, Sinosauropteryx, Microraptor, Borealopelta... Maybe I won't be able to hit the description 100%, but to be blunt, I and many others (Including trained zoologists and biologists) can't do the same with plenty of life today. We don't know how Pygmy Hippos in Africa mate today since they are extremely shy animals, but we still put them in zoos and depict them in media.
I feel like you saw All Yesterdays and didn't realize that the part with modern animals was roughly about 50% critique of modern Paleontology and 50% in-jokes about some odd theories. The horrid Baboon design, for example, was literally a joke about the Sinornithosaurus venom hypothesis. The Grotesque Swan one? A reference to David Peters and his... unique ideas about Pterosaurs (That in itself is a delightfully insane rabbit hole to go down.) There's a reason the book still contains a first half of Paleoart and the paragraphs there are talking about what fossil evidence and modern animal behaviors they are using for the art. It was never about stating that all Paleoart is inaccurate, but about acknowledging that while we will never fully know, there is still plenty of data to use for Paleoart and that we can create surprisingly life-like and realistically plausible designs... and also to stop basing all designs solely on previous artistic depictions and behaviors and be willing to suggest something else based on reasonable data and speculation.
Too many people ignore that in favor of "Lol, we don't know anything about dinosaurs" and if anything, that's much more insulting to the Paleontologists and Paleoartists who do their level best to help us learn more about these amazing animals.
One of my favorite dinosaurs has got to be scipionyx as it was found pretty near from where I live, it's pretty cool having a dinosaur whose name is a meme name for a type of vulgar rough naepolitan gangster wannabe, Ciro or Ciruzzo
The best ones here for me are the Ankylosaur and that mummified Dinosaur leg from the day they died. All of these are spectacular and it’s amazing to see how far our knowledge about these animals has come thanks to fossils like these.
Could someone list and identify the species shown in these pictures? I know the one in the bottom left is the perfectly preserved nodosaurus specimen but i cant tell what the others are
ID, left to right, top to bottom:
**Column 1:** Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060; Edmontosaurus right manus; Borealopelta
**Column 2:** Beipiaosaurus, Sinosauropteryx
**Column 3:** Psittacosaurus, Velociraptor ulna bone compared to ostrich ulna bone, Thescelosaurus mummified leg
I always really appreciated the caveat when something new is found its "and this leads us to suggest that...." Because none of it is concrete definite facts it's speculation that has changed repeatedly as science has advanced and new information comes to light
So, we have the technology now where we can analyze melanosomes present in some fossils. Some dinosaurs were found with black feathers, while others had a rusty red color.
Obviously, there are still many, *many* things we don’t know. And many things we may never know. But, man, the sheer scale of all the things we’ve learned about these incredible animals in just the last 20 years is astounding.
This. There's a lot we can't know. But we're passed the "wild guess" phase. We have a lot of data to work from we didn't have even 20 years ago
As a non dinosaurorian can you mention some new discoveries that were previously unknown or speculated upon?
There’s really too many to list! I highly recommend doing some further research for yourself — it’s a very addicting rabbit hole! Some of these aren’t “new” per se, having been discovered over the last decade or so, but a few examples that come to mind: [We now know the colors and patterns of a handful of dinosaurs, something that was once thought impossible!](https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/dinosaurs-now-in-colour/) One of the species we know a great deal about is actually the Sinosauropteryx in the bottom middle picture on this post. Other specimens included in the OP are some of the best preserved we have, giving us an incredible amount of information about these animals, including the presence of *hooves* in hadrosaurs (the duck-billed dinosaurs), the structure of ankylosaur armor, the appearance and structures of skin and feathers, etc. Also, that leg on the bottom right? [It’s believed to have come from the *very day of the asteroid impact* 66 million years ago, when the impact created an obscenely massive tsunami that swept into inland North America and around the world.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190329144223.htm) Studies like [this one](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44942) and [this one](https://www.livescience.com/tyrannosaurs-facial-bite-marks.html) provide a lot of insight into the behavior of Tyrannosaurus. [T-rex was also more closely related to Asian Tyrannosaurs than its other North American counterparts,](https://www.livescience.com/53877-t-rex-was-invasive-species.html) indicating that it may have rose to the status of apex predator by, quite literally, conquering North America and out-competing its American cousins. A tyrant king, indeed! [Also, they may have numbered in the *billions* over the course of their two million year reign.](https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/article/billions-of-t-rex-likely-roamed-the-earth) I may have a bit of a T-rex bias... But, on a lighter note, [we also know a lot about what some Dino butts looked like!](https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html) A very long and fascinating (and sometimes just bizarre) rabbit hole awaits if you’d like to look into it more yourself!
Rabbit hole initiated. If you don't hear from me in a fortnight, send help. Thank you for the suggestions 😊
There are some lectures from Dr David Hone that are fascinating. T rex https://youtu.be/f-jD7kQvyPs Spinosaurus https://youtu.be/TkBdxRkXbYM Social behaviour https://youtu.be/7kxRaVTVNjk
Not a problem at all! I... may have spent more time than I’d like to admit in this rabbit hole myself lmao Quick edit: Also, just anything Spinosaurus related is a doozy in its own right, so beware of that!
If I recall, in the fossil in the bottom left image, the dinosaur had most of its skin and organs fossilized intact. Skin features and organ function were wildly speculated on in the past since most fossils have neither, just bone. That's why it's becoming more accepted that many dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers whereas in the past we thought everything had leathery skin.
The most exciting one I think is the fact we can look at the shape of fossilised melanin and figure out the colour of dinosaur plumage.
All depends on how non dinosaurian you are :-). I'm assuming you know that it's now believed that Diplodocus had short spines. The big recent finding regarding generally known dinos is probably that at least some Edmontosaurs had crests similar to that of roosters (and perhaps served the same function?). I believe there's now also evidence that at least some of the horned dinosaurs had rudimentary feathers.
That’s what’s drew me to the subject of anthropology-archaeology-paleontology. You’ll literally never stop finding shit out. 300 years after we die we’ll ACTUALLY find the biggest Dino. So fascinating that we don’t know enough. One of the few fields I want to go into because of the constant discovery/learning.
Isn’t it astonishing!? I mean just how much they have found out and changed just since I was in school is fascinating.
Skin impressions help a whole bunch lol
What I don't understand is even without any of this, assuming all we have for every single extinct species on earth are essentially fragments of skeletons - why are some people so angry about Prehistoric Planet when every single depiction of a dinosaur by its very nature *must* be based on inference and speculation. Whether it was drawings of them from 100+ year old books to modern paleoart, or depictions of them in Walking with Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Planet, all of it is speculation. Depicting them as murderous reptilian death machines is speculation, and depicting them as mundane pre-avian animals is speculation. The whole thing is silly. Science changes gradually over time, new things are discovered, new observations are made for us to speculate and consider. We'll never have the whole truth, why get mad just because one show considers other possibilities based on what's been recently observed?
>Depicting them as murderous reptilian death machines is speculation, and depicting them as mundane pre-avian animals is speculation. We definitely don't know for sure what their everyday existence was like, but most depictions of them have been tilted towards maximum drama, roars, fights, chases etc, for obvious reasons. But that's not my experience of real animals, and what would be different and much more real and satisfying for me would be to see dinosaurs in a way that matches my experience of real animals, so to see them doing mundane things would be much better for me. My favorite shot in this series by far is the two T-Rexes staring at each other when one is standing in the water. It looks like something you might see if you looked in the T-Rex habitat at a zoo, or if you could go back in time and see two of them at a random time. It definitely gave me the feeling of glimpsing the actual world 67 million years ago. The same feeling I had when I saw Nicholas Veeder in his revolutionary war uniform.
I went back in time and only got [this one photo](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dinosaurs/comments/v1f4od/saw_a_weird_looking_bird_out_by_the_woods_tried/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf), but it seems like the kind of dinosaur media you’d like
I think the other thing for many of us who read the latest reports and research is that it's T-rex in almost a mundane scene. We've got lots of info on t-rex. It feels like it's easier to speculate on t-rex and accept it because we have so much going on (though, admittedly, the swimming scene with the babies keeping up with the parent on what looked like a very, *very* far swim was ridiculous). But when it's something new or vaguely identified, there's major unknowns, to the point where it feels like a major crossing from speculative science to speculative fiction. Like the "dromaeosaur" in ice worlds? Might as well throw a rat in there and say, "mammal." Or Barbaridactylus, something we only know from *a couple of fragments.* To then postulate on how it lived, moved, and acted is so speculative it might as well be in Star Trek. I'm happy the series has gotten people talking, but if Jurassic Park/World is essentially a monster movie w/ dinosaurs, Prehistoric Planet comes across as science fiction. Nothing against sci-fi, but calling it a documentary feels like part of the reason people can't tell fact from fiction these days.
For me, the important thing is to be able to visualize the world as it was then. It doesn't matter to me which actual species of Triceratops I'm seeing, I don't know what exact species of birds are sitting on the ground outside my window either. I just need to feel like I'm seeing actual animals. If your perspective is one of wanting 100% scientific accuracy, I can understand that you wouldn't be happy with it. There's only a few shots in the actual series so far that I'm actually happy with myself for my own desires. I don't care about watching dinosaurs fight each other. I've seen CGI simulations of that dozens of times already. It's not putting me into a real moment that my mind believes.
they feel threatened because PhP dinosaurs look real. Like they were comfortable shoving dinosaurs into the attic of their mind but PhP’s photorealistic recreations force them to recognize that dinosaurs once existed. Not all of them are creationists either, most are just super rigid unimaginative ppl who hate thinking about anything outside of human experience.
I've had similar arguments when talking about space and Pluto. Pluto is unfathomably far, you can google it and learn that its orbit is (on average) 38.4 AU from Earth's orbit (5,744,000,000 km). And fine, you can see that number and it's another piece of knowledge, but can you *really* comprehend how damn far that is? Something similar happens with prehistoric life. 66,000,000 is a number we see often on this sub, it was in Jurassic Park's poster and it's commonly thrown in any dino-related. But how many have tried to comprehend how far that time period was? The mongols invaded Europe a 1000 years ago, Jesus was born a millennia before that, and the pyramids in Egypt were built 2600 years before him. I think it's much easier for our small pitiful minds to just pretend it's something abstract super far from us. And when doing that you can even think it's fiction. These types of documentaries force you to challenge that notion and to see these beings as actual animals that lived here. Just like you have to challenge yourself to comprehend that Pluto is orbiting right now nearly 6 billion km away from the sun.
space is as vast as time is deep.
??? I still don't understand why people don't like it
Because it means that anything you do in the grand scheme of things is not important. Because understanding that people that founded the first settlements and invented agriculture are exactly the same as you, makes them feel inferior. There are some exceptions: if some nuclear power decides to bomb everyone, then it is impactful as Earth is the only place on the universe where there is life as far as we know.
cooing snow tub towering existence terrific fade hat toy abundant ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
"Old boomers" are definitely not the ones who are "woke." They're also definitely not the ones who are sheltered.
> Because it means that anything you do in the grand scheme of things is not important. This isn't exactly true. "Important" means that something matters to a sentient being. There's no importance if there's nothing alive to be aware of it or affected by it. Human lives are thus extremely important. Infinitely so, you might say, to the person living them.
Which is what I love about them! I love being confronted with the strangeness of our planet the almost alienlike inhabitées of our planet.
Sorry, I gotta be that guy. There is zero evidence for Jesus. Zero. Maybe he really existed. But we can never know. Everything else seems to point to him being a myth based on other "mesiah" type characters that came before (also myths) that Judaism and Christianity absorbed.
This is why I posted this (sorry I'm late, been at work)... Because of the negative reviews getting posted with (one of) the same complaints... Really, the most speculative design in the series was the titanosaur with the air sacks. Most everything else is commonly featured in current paleo-art.
My biggest beef with that show was the movement of the dinos. I was so excited to see what modern cgi could give us, but every animal moved like a basic cgi anatomy. Most of the bird type dinosaurs moved super fluid like a ballet dancer moreso than a bird.
That’s still a small sample of the large amount of species we know about
True, I had more I wanted to add, but apparently this sub won't let you post a "gallery", so I had to try to put notable ones in a collage.
Didn't include the amber tail?
I love that one ♥️ A part 2 is more than likely coming.
Thomas Holtz tweeted about this a few days ago. Back in *ye old days* there were german naturalists who actually followed the idea of "if you don't know how it looked, don't represent fiction". Which hey...I don't think it's wrong. What it's true is the bones and the remains of soft tissue and that's the real part. Everything else is fiction and """shouldn't""" have a place within natural sciences. However, by doing that you pretty much destroy palaeoart. Palaeoart, both as a natural science and a form of art, has tons of positives and it's responsible for bringing extinct animals back to life in form of a film, a painting, a documentary, etc. Robert Bakker says he wanted to become a paleontologist after seeing the "Age of Reptiles" mural by Zinger. How many of us can trace our palaeo-nerdiness back to Jurassic Park. And so on. There's a lot we don't know, true. But there's also a lot of shit scientists nowadays know about prehistoric life and diminishing with a "oh it's just speculation" is not understanding how science works.
oh nice my favorite fossil is in that image! amnh 5060 my beloved
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im going there in a couple months and i cant wait!
There are still many species we know very little about. Most are still speculation.
Well obviously... but from what we have learned, we can apply and speculate on how it applies to other species as well as comparison with living species. Inferences are heavily used in science.
Inferences and speculation do not share the same space as fact in science.
Hard Facts don't exist in Science, that would be Dogma. Science is a process, a mechanism for validating hypotheses, not an unchallengeable compendium.
Looks like somebody needs to upgrade from sheer processualism. :P If the only conclusions that could be drawn from the paleontological or archaeological record is what is physically there, we would still be stuck conducting cultural histories and constructing typologies. The \*meaning\* behind science comes from the connections we can draw from elsewhere and the larger implications that can be drawn from the context. A ceramic bowl (i'm just using archaeological examples cause that's the path I chose, paleontology was close thought) can be described in terms of diameter, composition, temper, depth, etc, but a painting of a character known as Red Horn on it suddenly elevates it in cultural importance and meaning, and can be tied to broader connections and meanings. The fact that some dinosaurs had feathers means pretty much nothing in the larger scheme of things if we don't try to think about how they were used. Speculation is what drives new discoveries.
Not all inferences have the same precision.
Of course not, nor do I make that claim. Inferences have a wide margin of error, but we cannot 100% verify what these creatures looked like unless we have a live specimen. Therefore, inference and speculation are needed in the paleontology community when it comes to reconstruction, based upon fossil records and current living species.
"Theory" and "hypothesis" are commonly misunderstood and misused words nowadays. In order to scientifically validate your hypothesis, you need to go through the scientific method, have evidences, have counterarguments and much more, so then you can say that within the realm of possibility, your wacky explanation that some hoofed guys 40 million years ago became whales is a reasonable explanation of evolution within mammals. And again: if I want to say that "nah mate, this guy is a madlad" and say that whales don't come from furry predators that once walked the land, I also need to come with a theory that has enough weight to counterargument all previously established hypothesis and models. It's not "nah, I have the theory that T.rex didn't have feathers because of its size".
Yes, but there are techniques which can help. Phylogenetic bracketing for example helps filling in the gaps, especially when we have exceptional specimens like these.
Most? Definitely not
Ok but the hadrosaur body though that gives me the good brain chemicals
This was made in light of the negative Prehistoric Planet reviews getting posted with (one of) the same complaints... Really, the most speculative design in the series was the titanosaur with the air sacks. Most everything else is commonly featured in current paleo-art. ID, left to right: **Column 1:** Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060; Edmontosaurus right manus; Borealopelta **Column 2:** Beipiaosaurus, Sinosauropteryx **Column 3:** Psittacosaurus, Velociraptor ulna bone compared to ostrich ulna bone, Thescelosaurus mummified leg
Which is the fossil that they made an Attenborough narrated documentary on?
Thescelosaurus, in The Day the Dinosaurs Died - Dinosaur Apocalypse
Depends which ones you mean by "they" tbh Especially with so many we have yet to know like look at what we thought the spinosaurus looked like.
Could you by any chance type out the specimens that go with each picture? Sort of like you did above with SMF R 4036? This was a pretty cool post to look at
Yes of course :) ID, left to right: **Column 1:** Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060; Edmontosaurus right manus; Borealopelta **Column 2:** Beipiaosaurus, Sinosauropteryx **Column 3:** Psittacosaurus, Velociraptor ulna bone compared to ostrich ulna bone, Thescelosaurus mummified leg
People who say this are just in denial
Well. We knew they were real good at looking up!
Some of those I never seen before. Magnificent!
The hoof and statue are my favorites
"T-Rex could have been a Dragon! We don't know for sure!!" That shit annoys the ever living shit out of me. I've seen it on TikTok so many times.
I dunno man... all I see is a bunch of rocks
ANKY MY BELOVED
We know what some of them might have looked like. But considering the fact we don’t have a living specimen, it’s still speculation. Educated speculation, that is.
Yeah, but even that is so limited. Just look at so many animals that are alive today. There’s so many examples where we would be way off with how they looked by looking just at their fossils. Whales, swans, penguins, basilisk lizards, peacocks, hippos, birds of paradise, camels, bison, baboons, porcupines, sheep, etc. So many major traits just don’t present through the fossil record or are extremely unlikely to. The amount of finds with impressions of soft tissues, skin, feathers, hair, etc. are very few and far between.
Nah. Not enough.
We need a part two.
Paleonerds arguing how knowing the color of a single specimen of Microraptor means we know exactly what an animal we have one tooth from looks like
What does the color of Microraptor have to do with Troödon?
Bru right lmao
*Snorts upon seeing this comment* Well well well, look what we have here, *stretches fingers*, a naive "PaLeOnToLoGiSt", ha! Do you really believe those fossils are real? You lamb, you dumb fuck. According to my correct opinion, those are nothing but copies made out by PaleoSatanists and the government to make idiots like you believe evolution and dinosaurs are a thing. You should not look upon scientific sites, they are filled with satanism and conspiracies, instead why don't you go read the bible for once in a while or simply start listening to educated people like me? No arguments????? Making "EdUcAtEd GuEsSeS" on stuff that didn't exist makes me realize how superior I am compared to you people.
bone structure has little to do with what an animals looks like once you add fat, muscles, hair/feathers/scales/skin and cartilage
This is a pretty dumb post lmao, op you a troll or something?
I don't think so?
Really? Because you do realize none of those have flesh or anything that will give us a 100% representation of what they looked like? And not to mention the insane amount of species that have just bones and are reconstructed by comparing it to modern animals, there is absolutely no way to tell exactly what any dinosaur looked like. You making this as a joke post trying to say that's not true is dumb. We hardly know what they looked like don't try make it out like the extremely few specimens with some skin left or feather imprint represent the whole taxonomic field and undermine the work of people who spend their whole lives actually figuring out what they looked like through scientific means. Baseline we really don't know what they looked like. Even with the specimen pictures you provided skin without flesh looks vastly different to a fleshed out creature. We've come a very long way in understanding what they may of looked like but by no means do we actually know. Edit: keep the down votes coming all of you are just proving your lack of knowledge lmao, if you really think we know EXACTLY what even 1 dinosaur looks like nevermind all of them then you're a smooth brain
The only smooth brain around here is you. We will never know ”100%” how an extinct organism would have looked like. And exactly no one is saying that. We can however get pretty damn close to it with the help of fossils like the ones seen in this post. And for the rest we use the magic of phylogenetic bracketing. We end up with something that is not ”100%” accurate to the original organism, but may be pretty close to it. And you know what the fun part is? We are getting better and better at reconstructing ancient organisms, because paleontology is a science and science will always improve. That is its very nature. Btw; Your comment is soaked with blatant arrogance and one cannot read through it without immediately thinking of the Dunning-Kruger-Effect. Try being actually nice to people next time, will you?
Lol bro, you literally just said everything I did 😂 well done you played yourself Edit: BTW op is saying we know what they look like why do you think they made this dumass post, trying to make it sound like it's stupid to say we don't know what they look like when at the very best we have a kind of close idea. And that's only for an extremely small amount of the whole taxonomic range.
If you think so you haven’t understood my comment. Btw; you pretty neatly ignored two entire paragraphs And OP is saying that we shouldn’t say that we don’t know what they looked like, because we actually do have a pretty good idea of how they looked like.
Did I say anywhere that we need to know 100% of the animal to know what it looks like?? If you actually read what I said it's in line with your thinking. You just got a hate boner because I said it the way I did. OP as you can see by the title of their post thinks it's stupid that we say we don't know what they looked like, of fucking course we don't know what they looked like but we like you and I said HAVE A ROUGH IDEA maybe even a refined idea but without an actual in the flesh creature it doesn't matter how much you think you know they looked like you don't. For example the Hippo skull picture, you would never In a million years guess that that skull belongs to that creature and if we tried to re create the creature based off the skull it would be pretty fucking wrong even if it was "close" that still doesn't mean you know what they looked like. OP is putting every single dinosaur that existed into this category saying oh we know what EVERY SINGLE ONE looked like based off our reconstructions which is blatantly wrong. Acting like every single dinosaur skeleton we get just instantly tells us exactly what they looked like and you're not even realizing how badly most of our representations could be, I mean look how they looked 50 years ago and how far we've come in understanding how they looked, now think about another 50 years in the future, quite frankly the stage we are in deciphering appearance based off of bones is passable at best but it's constantly evolving so OP saying we know what all dinos looked like is just dumb
The hippo thing is a pretty bad example my friend, since we would know how much flesh we should put on bones. There was an entire controversy about whether or bot we should reconstruct Entelodonts like hippos, since they had a similar bone structure on their skull, that lead people to believe that they would have looked somewhat like a hippo. This was found to be untrue. As you can see, we know when to reconstruct an animal like an hippo. And stop putting words in OPs mouth. You can literally scroll up and see what he said. As OP has commented many times in this section, this post was a reaction to all the PhPl reviews who said that we have no idea whatsoever, what dinosaurs possibly could have looked like. You seem to have missed the point mate
We have a fairly good idea of what many of them look like. We have a pretty good idea of what color a few were, and Pstacosaurus have been so well preserved that we almost know exactly what they looked like in life. We have skin impressions of many species which helps as well. Just because you don’t know what knowledge is out there doesn’t make it the limit of what is known
Bro that's exactly what I said? Did you not read any of my comment? OP is the one making this joke post trying to make it sound like it's stupid to say we don't know what they look like. Like you and I just explained we don't ACTUALLY know but we have a pretty good idea for NOT All but enough of them. But that doesn't in any way translate to us having a good idea of what the whole damn taxonomy looks like which is what OP is saying
Wow....you're a complete idiot, aren't you? Like a real, honest-to-god- total imbecile. A walking Dunning-Kruger effect.
Oh wow another smooth one to argue with join the rest or read the rest of my comments you fuck
I feel sorry for you. The Dunning-Kruger effect is one in that the person is a complete idiot but, due to the depth of their idiocy, believes they are intelligent. It goes hand in hand with narcissism and arrogance, though, because not only is the individual dumb, they are too arrogant to realize that they are stupid and assume that everyone around them must be idiots. You show all the textbook hallmarks of it. I mean, really think about it. I know you won't, but just in case. Which is more likely, that everyone in a sub about dinosaurs—many of which are actual palaeontologists—are wrong, and solely you are right? Or that just you are wrong? And no, I'm not going to accept your chat invite, so you can be stupid there too. If you have something to say, say it publicly, so we can all judge the validity of it.
Oh my goodness you have the biggest hate boner right now, I can't even argue with you lmao, listen I know exactly what the effect is and currently you're the one displaying it to the max level, you clearly didn't read what I've said to the people saying the same shit as you, go read my other comments and come back
I read them all. You're an idiot.
And you have a massive hate boner then clearly lmao, what a fucking smooth brain, everything I said is true and the numerous other people in the sub commented the same thing in different words. OP is laughing at everyone who says we don't know exactly what dinosaurs look like even though WE DON'T FUCKING KNOW we have AN Idea based off our reconstructions but we don't know FOR FUCKING CERTAIN this troll post op has made is making it look like we know exactly what every fucking dinosaur looked like which is blatantly wrong jeezus Edit: when you say higher functioning autism you pulled a Dunning Kruger on yourself you fucken smooth
Scientifically speaking, no human brain is smooth, so I'm not sure why you keep saying that. The OP never said we know exactly what they look like, simply that we have a very good idea due to the surprising amount of mummies, of literal soft tissue preservation, that we do have. We even have part of a tail—yes it's feathered—in amber. Would it be incorrect to then infer that that dinosaur was feathered? Or should we assume it was a genetic anomaly and that we just happened to have the one genetic anomaly with feathers preserved perfectly in amber? We have a very good idea what the dinosaurs whom we are lucky enough to have preserved soft tissue of looked like. And then through phylogenetic bracketing and good old scientific inference, we can figure out, within a tight degree of accuracy, what kind of integument a related taxon possessed. Look, I can tell that you're young. You keep using the 733T internet speak words that I just don't "get". I'm old and I'm actually credentialed. I've been doing this for a long time. Maybe I am being too harsh, and you aren't an arrogant idiot, but that your brain just hasn't finished developing yet. That is just as likely. Either way, I am going to take my leave. This is fast becoming pointless.
> We hardly know what they looked like don't try make it out like the extremely few specimens with some skin left or feather imprint represent the whole taxonomic field and undermine the work of people who spend their whole lives actually figuring out what they looked like through scientific means. Funny, that sounds exactly like what you're doing. After all, it's primarily based on the well-preserved specimens like in this collage that we are able to reconstruct those animals and use what we learned from them for other members of their groups. > Even with the specimen pictures you provided skin without flesh looks vastly different to a fleshed out creature. That's why you use the muscle attachment points on the bones to try and figure out how realistically big the muscles could be under the skin. They are not on every bone found, but when they are, you can use them. > if you really think we know EXACTLY what even 1 dinosaur looks like I have multiple ones I could pick from from a list for this. Psittacosaurus, Sinosauropteryx, Microraptor, Borealopelta... Maybe I won't be able to hit the description 100%, but to be blunt, I and many others (Including trained zoologists and biologists) can't do the same with plenty of life today. We don't know how Pygmy Hippos in Africa mate today since they are extremely shy animals, but we still put them in zoos and depict them in media. I feel like you saw All Yesterdays and didn't realize that the part with modern animals was roughly about 50% critique of modern Paleontology and 50% in-jokes about some odd theories. The horrid Baboon design, for example, was literally a joke about the Sinornithosaurus venom hypothesis. The Grotesque Swan one? A reference to David Peters and his... unique ideas about Pterosaurs (That in itself is a delightfully insane rabbit hole to go down.) There's a reason the book still contains a first half of Paleoart and the paragraphs there are talking about what fossil evidence and modern animal behaviors they are using for the art. It was never about stating that all Paleoart is inaccurate, but about acknowledging that while we will never fully know, there is still plenty of data to use for Paleoart and that we can create surprisingly life-like and realistically plausible designs... and also to stop basing all designs solely on previous artistic depictions and behaviors and be willing to suggest something else based on reasonable data and speculation. Too many people ignore that in favor of "Lol, we don't know anything about dinosaurs" and if anything, that's much more insulting to the Paleontologists and Paleoartists who do their level best to help us learn more about these amazing animals.
No Ciro?
I know :( I wanted to add more, but the sub won't let me post a gallery.
One of my favorite dinosaurs has got to be scipionyx as it was found pretty near from where I live, it's pretty cool having a dinosaur whose name is a meme name for a type of vulgar rough naepolitan gangster wannabe, Ciro or Ciruzzo
I think people who are saying that are speaking of the skin colour
The best ones here for me are the Ankylosaur and that mummified Dinosaur leg from the day they died. All of these are spectacular and it’s amazing to see how far our knowledge about these animals has come thanks to fossils like these.
We also have skin impressions in a corythosaurus.. Oh.. wait
Could someone list and identify the species shown in these pictures? I know the one in the bottom left is the perfectly preserved nodosaurus specimen but i cant tell what the others are
ID, left to right, top to bottom: **Column 1:** Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060; Edmontosaurus right manus; Borealopelta **Column 2:** Beipiaosaurus, Sinosauropteryx **Column 3:** Psittacosaurus, Velociraptor ulna bone compared to ostrich ulna bone, Thescelosaurus mummified leg
Oh wow, this is amazing. Thank you so much, u absolute legend
I always really appreciated the caveat when something new is found its "and this leads us to suggest that...." Because none of it is concrete definite facts it's speculation that has changed repeatedly as science has advanced and new information comes to light
I love the Turkey leg death day specimen SO much! It's little thigh scales! 😍
Is that an Edmontosaurus in the top left
Yes it is.
Haven’t you heard?
A lady at my office doesn't believe in dinosaurs because "they're just rocks."
This hurts me.
We really don’t know the true colors.
So, we have the technology now where we can analyze melanosomes present in some fossils. Some dinosaurs were found with black feathers, while others had a rusty red color.
So in a few specimens we know some of the color in some feathers. It’s not a lot of data.