It really baffles me that non of the great minds before that period knew they existed
In: Biology
To provide an example, [this this what an elephant skull looks like if the tusks aren’t there](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:African_elephant_skeleton_(11)_at_the_Royal_Veterinary_College_anatomy_museum.JPG). If people only found the skull, it wouldn’t have been obvious that it was an elephant skull even if they had seen a live elephant before. It’s believed that elephant skulls are where the mythological cyclops came from.
But even today there’s some uncertainty in what dinosaurs actually looked like. Soft tissue doesn’t preserve well and while there have been advances in that area, to where we can now find evidence of what dinosaur feathers may have looked like and possibly even what color they were, it will probably never be 100% certain. As an example, [this article](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7754553/Nightmarish-sketches-reveal-modern-animals-look-like-drew-based-skeletons.html) has some drawings of modern animals constructed from their skeletons in the same style that many dinosaurs were just a few decades ago.
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