Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There’s fundamentally just a lot we don’t know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I’m not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.
But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn’t have this “shrink wrapped” appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it’s plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn’t a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn’t a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn’t one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?
Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.
Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.
The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise.
I feel like a better way to represent “the threshold of the known” would be sort of the pictorial equivalent of “error bars” — instead of doing one image showing an animal that basically looks like it has mange because that’s all you can be sure of, do a matrix of images that show various extremes of possibilities.
I’m blanking on the exact phrase, but it’s something like “never believe a number with unreported error”.
To get further into the weeds there is a significant difference in approach between theoretical and experimental science. In experimental science it’s not only enough to communicate what you “know” but to communicate the underlying biased, tolerances and precisions of the thing being measured and modeling approach being used.
these represent the threshold of the known.
I would argue that those representations are inherently bad science because they do not communicate the margin of error. Grue, I believe you are spot on with a concept in how you would make those drawings more scientifically accurate, but ultimately they are artistic renderings of scientific understandings, but not scientific themselves.
While I don’t disagree with WoodScientist that modern scientific institutions are inherently conservative, the process of science is not, nor should it be. Apologizing for the inherent conservatism in science is unscientific, harms belief in vetted resulted, conflates institutions for processes and projects a people problem onto the inanimate.
i’d say these days paleo art is more “okay so we know what related animals look like, and we know what animals in the same general niche look like, so let’s use those to fill in the blanks from the skeleton and make something that looks like you could find it in the wild”
honestly i feel like many people are quite a bit too generous towards people of the past, people just really liked to write fanfiction with fossils as the base for a lot of the history of paleontology… Basically like what jurassic park did but they passed it of as enlightened science, conveniently forgetting to tell people that they just went ahead and moved a bone found near the legs up to the nose…
Certainly there was genuine attempts to recreate dinosaurs, but good lord a lot of it is just obviously biased, lord forbid dinosaurs not be portrayed as sluggish obsolete monsters!
We know from the bones many things such as the weight the animal could support and how they walked indicating how they balanced. Depending on the age and sediment the animal might have even left a pretty good outline, and in highly alkaline conditions some saponified tissue would remain (completely denatured, but the shape would be there).
The creature in the OP meme for example was a hind-legged walker, so it couldn’t be too front heavy and it’s front paws weren’t heavy weight-bearing. Just like all of it’s close relatives who came before and after it.
HOWEVER! This interpretation can change! Originally only two Spinosaurus specimen were collected in very small number of bones with which to make recreations, due to difficulties in and around the region of Egypt. It can be very difficult for archeologists to make digs given their history with the region and the local extremist factions who oppose the concept of things like dinosaurs and ancient cultures. Recently a 2014 study which looked at one particular rock proposed the Spinosaurus tail was webbed, indicating it was semi-aquatic, which would have an impact on weight distribution of the animal and support the idea of a more bouyant build.
Obligatory:
Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There’s fundamentally just a lot we don’t know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I’m not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.
But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn’t have this “shrink wrapped” appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it’s plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn’t a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn’t a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn’t one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?
Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.
Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.
I feel like a better way to represent “the threshold of the known” would be sort of the pictorial equivalent of “error bars” — instead of doing one image showing an animal that basically looks like it has mange because that’s all you can be sure of, do a matrix of images that show various extremes of possibilities.
I’m blanking on the exact phrase, but it’s something like “never believe a number with unreported error”.
To get further into the weeds there is a significant difference in approach between theoretical and experimental science. In experimental science it’s not only enough to communicate what you “know” but to communicate the underlying biased, tolerances and precisions of the thing being measured and modeling approach being used.
I would argue that those representations are inherently bad science because they do not communicate the margin of error. Grue, I believe you are spot on with a concept in how you would make those drawings more scientifically accurate, but ultimately they are artistic renderings of scientific understandings, but not scientific themselves.
While I don’t disagree with WoodScientist that modern scientific institutions are inherently conservative, the process of science is not, nor should it be. Apologizing for the inherent conservatism in science is unscientific, harms belief in vetted resulted, conflates institutions for processes and projects a people problem onto the inanimate.
And a cat
That’s just a hairless cat that lost its ears fighting other cats 😅
That does more accurately convey their behavior.
(Except that’s not how paleo art works anymore)
I know it’s a meme, but when this is posted without clarification, it spreads to people who think it’s real and they regurgitate it as fact
How does paleo art work now? What’s done differently?
i’d say these days paleo art is more “okay so we know what related animals look like, and we know what animals in the same general niche look like, so let’s use those to fill in the blanks from the skeleton and make something that looks like you could find it in the wild”
honestly i feel like many people are quite a bit too generous towards people of the past, people just really liked to write fanfiction with fossils as the base for a lot of the history of paleontology… Basically like what jurassic park did but they passed it of as enlightened science, conveniently forgetting to tell people that they just went ahead and moved a bone found near the legs up to the nose…
Certainly there was genuine attempts to recreate dinosaurs, but good lord a lot of it is just obviously biased, lord forbid dinosaurs not be portrayed as sluggish obsolete monsters!
We know from the bones many things such as the weight the animal could support and how they walked indicating how they balanced. Depending on the age and sediment the animal might have even left a pretty good outline, and in highly alkaline conditions some saponified tissue would remain (completely denatured, but the shape would be there).
The creature in the OP meme for example was a hind-legged walker, so it couldn’t be too front heavy and it’s front paws weren’t heavy weight-bearing. Just like all of it’s close relatives who came before and after it.
HOWEVER! This interpretation can change! Originally only two Spinosaurus specimen were collected in very small number of bones with which to make recreations, due to difficulties in and around the region of Egypt. It can be very difficult for archeologists to make digs given their history with the region and the local extremist factions who oppose the concept of things like dinosaurs and ancient cultures. Recently a 2014 study which looked at one particular rock proposed the Spinosaurus tail was webbed, indicating it was semi-aquatic, which would have an impact on weight distribution of the animal and support the idea of a more bouyant build.
It was hotter back then.
Yeah man, but it was a dry heat!