this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025

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Make dinosaurs weirder (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_mummy

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Wake up babe, they just renamed the Platapudactilisaurus

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Just looking at the skeleton, we would reconstruct a lot of thing wrong.

Camel:

Platypus:

Seal:

Elephant:

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[+] [email protected] -9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

You might like the various works of David Hone, a very talented and well spoken paleontologist who talks in depth about how they know what they do know, and gives several examples of poor paleontology and what they’re doing wrong.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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