I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.
XKCD
So that people don’t need to go through the notes:
- We have fossils of spider webs
- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of
- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa
- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)
If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.
We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.
- We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
- We know they had remarkable vision.
- We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
- We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
- We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.
We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.
The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”
(Art credit Julio Lacerda)
Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.
(Art credit Vitor Silva)
This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.
We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.
We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.
We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)
We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.
As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.
If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)
Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”
Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health
@lusus–naturae
Disclaimer: I’m a little drunk and don’t feel like citing sources.
we (and by “we” I mean people much smarter than me) know oviraptor, a small(ish) theropod, not only constructed its nests and arranged its eggs carefully, we know they died guarding their nests often enough that many parents were fossilized right on top of their eggs. Originally it was popularly thought that they were subsisting on and stealing eggs so much that they were fossilized in the act, hence the Latin name that basically means “egg thief,” but later analysis of the eggs shows they were oviraptor eggs. Iirc articulated skeletons show that oviraptor would sit* on its eggs to incubate them like a modern bird.
We know modern birds 1) are endothermic, 2) have a bald patch on their chests to make skin-to-egg contact for greater heat transfer, and 3) do a silly little dance to rotate their eggs through the nest so every baby gets equal amounts of warmth. From all this, we can deduce that oviraptor probably engaged in similar behaviors and had similar traits. We know this gigantic turkey thing loved its babies. And this is mostly from bones and the contexts we find them in.
Related: the closest living relatives to dinosaurs are birds (which ARE theropod dinosaurs) and crocodilians (which are not). Both birds and crocodilians are disproportionately more likely to be “smarter” than most reptiles and more protective of their young than most reptiles. We can’t know for certain and there were probably exceptions but i think it stands to reason that many dinosaurs were similarly intelligent and, for lack of a better word, loving.
We know velociraptors (obligatory “they were only knee-high” remark) fought, possibly preyed on, protoceratops. We know protoceratops would use its beak to defend themselves; they would bite attackers. We found a pair of mostly complete articulated skeletons, a velociraptor and protoceratops, eternally preserved in battle against each other. Geologists think the two in that single fossil were buried suddenly in a sand dune collapse, hence why they were preserved articulated and tangled up in each other.
We also know there’s a lot we don’t know. Squids basically never fossilize because of their habitat and a quirk of their biochemistry. Most living things in general get eaten rather than fossilized. Swamps and bogs have notoriously acidic soil which can preserve things in the right circumstances and can completely dissolve things under other circumstances. Geology destroys fossils. Humans destroy fossils, sometimes on purpose and sometimes on accident.
But there’s a lot we do know. There’s dinosaur mummies, animals that were mummified when they were still fresh and then the mummified soft tissues fossilized along with the bones and other hard tissues. These mummies often preserve pigments and skin textures and other small details. We have tracks. We have dung. We have pollen and spore samples. We have a LOT of people who are full of love and passion and patience who have dedicated their lives to understanding this stuff, to being lights in the darkness.
Btw. These same people are how we know megalodon is definitely zero question extinct, how we’re pretty sure there’s no equivalent large predators we don’t already know about. The reason we know they existed is the same reason we know they don’t anymore: all the teeth we find are millions of years old. Also: we also know Mokele-mbembe isn’t a fuckin dinosaur and that’s just white people being weird and racist about rural African culture. And there’s nothing in Loch Ness besides tourists. Etc. there’s a lot we don’t and can’t know but there’s a lot we do and it’s because of people who are much better at explaining it than i am.
