: How do artists draw ancient animals accurately only from fossils?
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They don’t really, we just keep updating our knowledge as we learn more. In a lot of early dinosaur art, [theropods like the tyrannosaurus were depicted as very vertical, leaning their tail against the ground like a kickstand.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/de/b2/c6deb23589165aa8371e98cf957ec512.jpg)
Later on, as we learned more about biomechanics and better identified how bones fit together, we started [depicting theropods like the tyrannosaurus as far more horizontal with stiff extended tails for balance.](https://scitechdaily.com/images/Tyrannosaurus-rex-Dinosaur.jpg)
But we still had a habit of depicting dinosaurs as if their bodies were like a supertight sock pulled around their skeleton. That’s not what real animals look like.[Just look at how weird these featherless chickens look.](https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/t_share/MTc0MDczMTU5NDE3MzQxNTA2/featherless-chickens.jpg) That’s what you’d get if you took a chicken skeleton and then just drew a skin outline around them to get your depiction of a chicken. Barely looks anything like a chicken.[An elephant skull looks like this.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1534/3595/products/R_S061_ELEPHANT_AFRICAN_2015-600x600_600x.jpg?v=1579825286) That big hole in the skull is the attachment points for the muscles of its trunk. But again, elephant skulls have been drawn as cyclopses in the past with a big eyeball in that hole.
So even now we’re constantly evaluating, we think many later theropods might have had feathers for instance.
And the way we figure things out is evolving. Back in the day, people would just try to puzzle skeletons together and that was it. When elasmosaurus, a long-necked aquatic animal, was first discovered, it’s discoverer put its head on its tail. Because he couldn’t imagine such a long-necked, short-tailed animal.
These days we have many tools that can help. We make digital scans of fossils so that we can reconstruct even incomplete skeletons or skeletons made of crushed bone since fossils are rarely perfect.
We can model muscle on to bone in simulated models based on our modern knowledge of how bodies work mechanically and biologically. That provides a better understanding of how something looked (muscles provide a lot of shape to a body).
We can make biomechanical 3d simulations to examine things like the range of motion and the forces involved in locomotion and that tells us a lot of how an animal could move or behave.
And a really important tool in our toolbox is mapping the timeline of genetic changes. The shapes and body plans of animals that live today didn’t just appear. There are millions of years of evolution behind them and by charting those genetic changes across time, we can figure out how animals are related.
Birds are direct descendants from some types of dinosaurs for instance. And knowing that we can start looking for similarities that we never thought to look for before. Like feathers. We thought of that connection before we found evidence, but by now we have found a fossil that clearly shows a feathered dinosaur.
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