How did scientists visualized the images or depictions of a living dinosaur by its bones or fossil?
In: Biology
you can make quite intelligent assumptions on the size and location of the muscles by looking at the bones and taking a reference from close living relatives like birds.
but the more superficial aspects are at best *slightly* informed guesses. skin is very rarely preserved in a meaningful fashion, and i doubt pigmentation fares any better either. it may also be hard to find evidence for what covers those skin too. for an example it was only in the recent decades that the scientific community started to accept that velociraptors were feathered (at least for it to become mainstream knowledge, paleontologists probably knew this was possible further back).
Short answer: badly.
Slightly longer answer: The start is kind of easy. If you have most of the bones, you can usually fill in any gaps by looking at modern equivalents or other contemporary animals with similar body structure. Once you have a more or less full skeleton, you can make logical connections of tendons and muscles so the creature will be able to move.
Then comes the parts they do badly. They basically assume the skin is directly ontop of all of these muscles and tendons. I have heard this process referred to as “shrink wrapping.” It leads to animals with no fat, and almost no face beyond the skull. They then have to guess at any sort of soft tissue bits that would be outside of the body. For example, an elephant’s trunk wouldn’t show up in fossils. They also have no way of knowing about several things outsideof the body; there would be almost no way of knowing about spiderwebs from a fossil record.
There are a lot of examples of “modern animals drawn like dinosaurs.” A quick google of that phrase gives interesting results.
A lot of it was guessing. Keep in mind, fossils were often incomplete, many were assembled based on incorrect assumptions, even such things as putting the wrong head on the wrong body and making something that never actually existed
So a lot of the early dinosaur reconstructions were just wild guesses
Over the next two hundred years we would study fossils more closely, we would find new fossils that showed new kinds of information, we would begin to compare to living animals, we would begin to add computer modeling to show gait, etc
Every year we find something new to improve our ability to depict dinosaurs.
By analyzing the bones and their structure they could tell how muscles were attached to the bones. Then they (probably) guesstimate the sizes of those muscles based on the estimated mass of the body parts and determined the size of the muscles, or rather the size the muscles need to be to make the Dino move. Then they just added skin on top of the muscles based on our knowledge of reptiles in general and there we go – estimation of how dinosaurs looked.
Oh by the way there is a thought that dinosaurs could have had feathers.
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