More specifically, how do they come up with answers to the ‘less obvious’ questions such as color, behaviour etc?
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It is a constantly every changing field. New evidence comes to light, and new theories are changed. With exact color, pigmentation does not generally exist with modern fossil records, and so illustrations take a lot of artistic liberties. Sometimes they base the illustrations off modern day animals. Most of the time its pure guesswork.
Stuff like behavior, while still guesswork, is more informed. How a skeleton is laid out, how certain body parts are positioned, how certain teeth are shaped, can tell you a lot about how an animal can act. If you can guess how an animal eats, how it walks, you can make good guesses about how it lives its everyday lives.
And again, because we cannot observe these animals in real life, at the end of the day its still all guesswork. That’s why conflicting theories and debates can exists amongst the paleologist field.
For a contemporary example, look up all the discussion about Spinosaurus and the debate of its aqueous nature.
They make them up. The fossilized bones don’t tell them what color the creature was or how it behaved, they try to guess these things from context or comparison to other animals. Most herbivores are not very aggressive unless threatened so they assume herbivorous dinosaurs were similar. The current theory is that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and a few fossils show feathers, so the assumption is that they were colorful just like modern birds. We don’t know that, but they’re related animals so it’s possible.
At first they thought that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a predator, then the scavenger theory came about for a while because they had a large area in the skull devoted to smell. In modern animals that can mean a scavenger. Then they found several different bones of animals that had healed injuries from a T-Rex bite, now they’re carnivores again.
It’s a series of educated guess, but it’s guesses.
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