This has always been the one thing that has always bug me with the creation of dinosaurs in book, tv, movies etc. If you look at the skulls of hippos or elephants, they look far different than the actual living animal.
They don’t just look at the bone structure.
Scientists are the ones who figured out that dinosaurs had feathers. Whenever science is proven wrong, it’s with more/better science.
Science success story:
Aboriginal religions generally hold that long ago in the Dreaming times, the world was cold, there was less water, and the coast was further away. You used to be able to walk to many of the islands around the Australian coast, because there were land bridges.
White people generally assumed these stories were mythological fiction, because white people are often racist and intolerant. However, science eventually figured out that 10,000 years ago, there was an ice age. The polar ice caps were bigger, and the ocean was shallower. Those land bridges were found under the modern ocean through satellite imaging. Aboriginal religions were right, and science proved that these religious histories had been preserved and kept accurate for 10,000 years!
Science wins again!
They even know the colouration of a bunch of them, like this Sinosauropteryx:
One of the reasons I would love to travel to the future is to see all the ways that people and science are confidently incorrect about depictions of dinosaurs now, and how they’re depicted like 300 years in the future. Even within my lifetime, we’ve gone from slow, fat lizard turds to something realistic like this lil’ guy. Amazing stuff.
I share your sentiment but I’d rather go back and see for myself. The future is completely unknown, who knows if you’d land right on the front line in WWIII. At least in the past I have a vague idea of what parts of time to avoid landing in.
You could say the same for the past, we don’t know when dinosaur World War 2 was, perhaps you’ll meet dinosaur Elon Musk and have to talk to him, it’s a hell of a risk.
I’m glad it was so happy when it died. Doing itsy little walk, my cat does that when he has successfully captured the elusive ball of foil.
But first somebody had to make a movie with the wrong data, making the whole field cool enough to get funding to found out they were wrong.
Shaved rabbit:
I’m not old enough to see naked bunnies 🫢
Look at those lil ‘staches! That’s the best thing I’ve seen all day
Is this a certain type of rabbit or is it normal to shave them while leaving a moustache?
I imagine the shaver meant to leave the whiskers be
What the animal’s skeleton looks like. Or How the animal’s skeleton looks.
I mean hares basically look like the sketch (plus ears)
This is something that machine learning may actually be useful for
Honestly not that far off. It’s like a wet bunny without the ears.
And if the scientists tried hard enough, they could probably figure out the large ears, too – the skull would have slightly stronger muscle attachment points and vasculature openings to support the larger ears … although that still wouldn’t really tell the scientists what shape the large ears were, though. So you might still get a very odd-looking bunny out of it.
@pieguy@lemmy.sdf.org this doesn’t alarm you?
No, it alerts me
I thought the bun is the one who is alert, and you’re just notified?
All Todays
Just to add context, there is a good book called All Yesterdays about how earlier assumptions of dinosaur appearances based on fossil records have been challenged over time by new evidence. A lot of the artists who have developed visual recreations of dinosaurs in the past were working under assumptions of what dinosaurs were supposed to look like. But skeletons alone aren’t always the best reference to use to base appearance off of, because soft tissue (lost to time) can often contain the most iconic aspects of a species.
So just to riff on that idea, the book contains a section called “All Todays” in which artists take modern animal skeletons we are familiar with and recreate them as if they were dinosaurs. So you end up with these gaunt creatures that are missing distinct features like ears, noses, fur/features, and coloration.
I go back to All Tomorrows every now and then. It’s weird.
No room for wings? What if they found them elsewhere and placed them thinking this were a flying mammal?
