Do paleontologists ever misplace bones and how often?
In: Biology
They study existing animals and compare.
Despite millions of years of evolution the bones of prehistoric animals have a lot in common with current animals. We can easily identify ribs, skulls, femurs, and other bones.
By comparing the fossilized bones to similar animals we have today like Birds and Reptiles the paleontologists can figure out where everything goes.
If you study existing animal skeletons, you can guess where dino bones go together but mistakes happen 🙂
Yes they do. The dinosaur known as brontosaurus had a wrong head for decades. And brontosaurus basically never existed. Just the apatosaurus
https://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-the-brontosaurus-never-even-existed
There was q1uite a bit of confusion with the very first dinosaurs found.
Nowadays with vertebras at least there rarely have any problem like that anymore. Every animal descended from the first fish to crawl out of the ocean has basically the same bodyplan. Between that and having an idea where bones go in related species that we do know a lot about, scientist can usually make pretty good guesses not just where a bone goes in a skeleton but even what a full skeleton might have looked like just from a handful of bones.
Of course outside the vertebra things aren’t always that easy. Like this shark-like animal from which we only have teeth that clearly are like that of exiting sharks, but they are arranged in a circular pattern unlike and shark or shark-like creature anyone has ever seen. There were a lot of competing theories just how such a circular saw like arrangement of teeth might fit into the jaw of a fish.
And then there are the fossils of creatures that are completely unlike anything today. When scientist first saw some fossils from the burgess shale they had no idea how to interpret them. They weren’t sure what side was up or down and back and front on some creatures and they initially mistook one famous creature as being just parts of different creatures or plants that happened to be fossilized next to each other.
And we have some stuff that is even older where we are sure it is the fossil of something that was once alive, but not if it was an animal a plant or something else.
Sometimes you really don’t have the context to understand what you are seeing.
But if something is so recent and so closely related as us and other existing animals to have actual bones, recognizing each bone for what it is and understanding where it goes in your average tetrapod skeleton is not too hard.
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