Eli5: How are prehistoric animals beeing reconstructed, with just teeth or single bones having been found? How accurate can these reconstructions really be?
In: Biology
Not super accurate. but you can rebuild an animal by looking at the place you found it, and looking at its living counterpart. So if you find a large bone in a cave, it obviously can’t be from a chicken. It has to be from a large animal. Are there a lot of other bones that don’t seem to match? That means that the large animal was probably a meat eater. So what large animal eats meat and lives in caves today? Well it could be a wolf, or a bear or something. Are there any other bones that seem to fit? Maybe teeth? or are there any other finds similar to this? How old is the bone?
It’s basically just a list of logical questions that narrow down the list of possibilities until you get a result, which is correct until it’s proven wrong.
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