How do paleontologists recreate a whole skeleton out of five bones and one tooth?

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Just how?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

Bones and teeth are matched to find similar bones and teeth, then based on where they match, they make up the rest.

For example, a shark tooth. We have living sharks which have teeth. When a huge shark tooth is dug up, the nearest living match to the tooth found is scaled up to the size of the found tooth, along with large sharks (whale shark) found today and they guess that it would look like the [Megalodon](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UCgERDCYii8/maxresdefault.jpg), without any actual truth that it did not look like [Zirga](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/godzilla/images/9/9c/Zigra.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/700?cb=20150125180203)