They look at related and similarly adapted modern animals when trying to make visualizations of fossils, it’s all just guessing.
Also the bones need to be in the right position
That is one cute beaver pic on the left. PM more of your beavers.
Fossils many times are more than bones and we get actual imprints of their whole tail or other parts of them
This is some real RFK level science here.
It’s sneaking up on creationist levels of ‘science’, like where they argue recreations of Australopithecus are just ‘imagination’ and present their own version of Lucy as as a quadriped, completely ignoring the overwhelming evidence from her skeleton that she could not have walked that way (and also ignoring that we have hundreds of other specimens of her species).
It really seems that lots of people’s conception of these fields is based on very outdated concepts, either unaware or ignoring all the evidence and advancements of the past 50 years or so.
I don’t think dinosaurs were taking x-rays of beaver tails, my dude. Go read a book sometime.
This may seem cheesy or pathetic, and I apologize for that, but I want to say: thank you for catching me off guard with your silly comment and giving me a badly-needed smile and laugh when I’m fucking miserable and in a lot of pain. It’s been a while. Seriously, I appreciate it. You’re a hoot :)
Don’t velociraptors have xray vision though?
That’s why they’re called velociraptors.
Nah, you’re thinking of the much more dangerous “acceleraptors”. Velociraptors were very different from how they are commonly portrayed.
So then distanceraptors are yet to be discoverd?
No, much like how brontosaurus was later discovered to be a mix of bones from various individuals, “Distanceraptor” is actually a conflation of multiple Displacemosaurids.
Sorry to break these news to you but in 2015 they discovered that Brontosaurus actually existed, so the “it was a mix of other species bones” is wrong, as much as a fun fact it was 😟
Thanks for the fascinating read! It seems like the specific taxonomy is still far from certain and needs validation, by the study authors’ own admission, but you’re absolutely correct that it wasn’t the bones of multiple species! I could swear there was another one of those from Germany that was a mishmash. Do you remember what that one was? I’m just a geochemist, not a palaeontologist. But anyway, I look forward to seeing validation studies by others of the 2015 findings! It would be great to see all of that hard work pay off! Do you know of any? I wasn’t able to find any from a cursory glance around the internet.
I thought they were called like this because of their love of bicycles.
Jaws was never their scene.
Only on weekends
Idiot, why do you think We can see all their bones?
No. This was created by someone who has no idea how any of this work. Soft tissues leave marks on bones.
Soft tissues can also become fossils under the right conditions. For an example, here is the fossil used for the B. markmitchelli holotype:
It’s the single most detailed and complete soft tissue fossil ever discovered. It took the technician six years to extract and separate the fossil from the surrounding stone. The technician’s name is Mark Mitchell, and the species was named after him.
The articles on that are a fascinating read, thank you!
Don’t ruin my dream of fluffy dinosaurs 😭
Smaller dinosaurs might have had fluff, bigger ones probably didn’t, like most big mammals. Bigger body, more heat to dissipate, but less relative surface to do so; the square-cube law can be a bit of a bitch, for big (probably at least somewhat) endothermic critters.
Giraffes have hair, though, and woolly mammoths were a thing, so big fluffy dinosaurs might have been a thing, especially in colder climates.
Also, looking at bird behaviour, I wouldn’t be surprised if even mostly bald dinos had some colorful feathers on their arms, tail, or head for displaying…
It is thought now that dinosaurs had a sort of fluff. Like feathers but not evolved to fly with yet.
Soft tissues leave marks on bones
Could you explain how they leave marks?
Your bones aren’t just swimming around in a sea of muscles. They are attached to the muscles and sinews. So those places where they are attached are formed in specific ways depending on what is attached.
Also, as you move throughout your life, those attachments can cause stress in places that build up, and your bones will show all of that. For instance, even though all humans have the same soft tissue connection points, we can tell by a skeleton whether a person had a life of hard labour vs relative luxury, whether they were an archer with stronger and more stressed arm muscles, etc.
If tail vertebrae, for instance, have spent their life supporting and moving a heavy amount of soft tissue, those connection points will look much different than a similar tail of skin and bone with far less weight to bear.
So now, we have a pretty good idea not only where soft tissues attached, but their relative size, strength, and use.
Too late, i already imagined a flat-tailed T-rex.
So one of the biggest leaps they have made in reconstruction over the last few decades is matching similar bone structure that supports soft tissue. It doesn’t work for all soft tissue, but if the beavers tail bones have bumps or other features that hint at supporting extra soft tissue there is a chance.
All the stuff birds have, like inflatable neck sacks and feathers that move with muscles are examples of things we absolutely wouldn’t get with fossils that are even better than a beaver tail.
Well, now I want to see an artist’s rendition of a T. rex doing this:
The Prehistoric Planet documentary series does it with sauropods, it’s pretty sick.
Also, in 40 million years, you can match the beaver fossils to the bones of their still living descendants and find similar features.
The idea of non-avian dinosaurs with the diverse features and behaviors birds have is very fun to me, and I hope fictitious depictions of birdsaurs becomes as common as classic dinosaurs’s.
I want to see a T. Rex do this.
I always appreciate an enthusiastic and educational response to situations like this.
I like to imagine T. rex arms were small because that’s how they communicated with their octopus rider.
They evolved to be small so they cold more easily fit into the actuator gauntlets that controlled the Gundam.
I mean… you can see the processes (bony protrusions on the vertebrae) are long and flat and only transverse (sticking out the sides, not up/down) so… it would be pretty obvious it was a flat tail? Sure maybe they might not get that it wasn’t fuzzy without any fossils if it, and maybe they make it slightly less round, but they’re scientists not idiots. Yeah some has come a long way and some older models sucked sure but it ain’t like we are vibe coding their appearance.
Vibe coded lion:
It’s only obvious because you already know what a beaver looks like.
I mean, no?
You can see no vertical protrusions of the vertebrae so there’s going to be A: vertical movement as muscles can best attach to pull up/down. And B: a likely flat structural rail with how wide the horizontal protrusions are. C: nothing sharp or heavily weighted at the end so likely not a huge weaponised tail like a thagomizer. So… you’ve got a probably flat tail, than can slam down on stuff.
Now figuring out WHY it was like that would require being able to find fossils around rivers and being able to tell those rivers had dams or something cuz idk how they would figure out exactly how they use their tails but… yeah you can figure the general shape fine based on vertebrae anatomy which leads to (possible)muscle anatomy. Some bones don’t function the way they look and can throw stuff off. Someone else already mentioned stuff like air sacks in birds and such that would really throw off anatomy based on bone and assumed muscular structure from where bones could have attached muscles.
Pretty much. You can factually tell that a lot of something was going on with all of those delicious muscle hooks on such a small frame, but a flat paddle mightn’t be their first thought. Really depends on who sees it first, but they’d eventually get at least close. Just give it a few years of screaming. Yes, both external and internal.
They always use mammals for that kind of comparison. Show me a reptile with that kind of muscle/fat composition.
The phylogenetic definition of reptile includes birds, so… Penguins, I suppose?
Birds? You mean the last remaining dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs were not reptiles. They were warm blooded, and birds descended from them.
Birds are reptiles. Commonly, we wouldn’t say so, but they’re in the same clade. The avians are closer related to the crocadilians than the crocs are to other reptiles like the squamates - lizards and snakes.
Also people are fish. You can’t evolve out of your clade.
Hank Green went off about this recently. “Fish” just has no scientific meaning, and there are fish tetrapods.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but ultimately there is a problem in classifying “fish” in the modern scientific taxonomy system - it has no good phylum to fit in as its a term that’s a bit more broad than that, but not broad enough to make for a kingdom.
Sure, but isn’t the point that what we’d call ‘fish’ back when everything lived in the oceans, like pre-Devonian, the ancestors of all modern life?
We can’t out-evolve our clade, so all land animals are fish? And also we’re all amphibians, and everything directly leading to us? Insects, plants, and fungi are separate, but we’re technically fish?
Or am i misunderstanding that?
(e: if there are no ‘fish tetrapods’, where did tetrapods come from?)
Yeah, I’m not really arguing for or against the word fish technically fitting all land animals. I think that using it that way showcases the problem of trying to fit common terminology like “fish” into the scientific taxonomic system. The definition of fish has no use in that context.
Also, there are fish which are also arguably tetrapods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopterygii
That’s fair. Honestly, all of taxonomy is just lines we draw, and all of evolution is really a fuzzy gradient. We can’t even figure out where the line for ‘human’ begins, because that’s also a meaningless term, really.
So the fact that we’re fish is as meaningful (or meaningless) as the fact that we’re human.
(And thanks for the link! That’s a cool, uh, ‘fish’.)
All dinosaurs had beaver tails, got it!
One thing I wouldn’t mind AI to do, train a model with standardised data like this, and have it match the reconstruction. After that it can use common and less common reconstructions. After that try to map as much info from a dinosaur fossil to said standardised data structure and generate possible reconstruction for said dinosaur
Oh. I like this idea. This is the kind of thing AI would be good for.
