Eli5 How do paleontologists find things out?

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More specifically, how do they come up with answers to the ‘less obvious’ questions such as color, behaviour etc?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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