Fossil, yes, but how accurate was it? How did we know how their eyes looked like? How did we know they made that roaring sound? Their colors? How did we arrive to such a clear depiction of dinosaurs?
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We don’t, every year we discover more and the picture gets better and better. That said there’s a lot of what we see that sre just best guesses. Like did most dinosaurs actually have feathers and sound like a duck. We are always learning more as we catalog more fossils or even discover new information from old fossils using new techniques.
Things like size, shape are the easier parts. Things like skin color, behavior and lifestyle are harder. Some dinos we only have a couple pieces of and some we have lots and lots of examples.
Everything outside the basic body structure is conjecture. We make educated guesses based upon their living ancestors and relatives (birds and crocodiles).
We dont, but its very educated guesses that comes from looking at their descendants such as birds and reptiles. The paleonthogical society has agreed on a lot of things, and those things are whats most commonly taught and shown.
It’s mostly speculation, since soft tissue doesn’t really survive for thousands of years without proper preservation, we can’t know how their skin color was, not even the shape of their throat to know how they sounded like.
I want to clarify that I’m not an expert in any sense, so don’t take this answer very seriously
We don’t REALLY know what they look like unless a creature has been perfectly preserved. Some problems involved are that softer-tissue things like skin, fur, feathers, fat deposits, etc. might not survive the extreme geologic times like bones do.
Do a search for something like “what would modern animals look like if drawn like dinosaurs” and you would see how potentially horrifying some current animals would look like if we based their re-creations only on what they might look like just from bones and bare skin.
Most of it is inferred from either the body structure we do know from bones, or from their still living descendants. We know how big eyes were from eye sockets. We know a good bit about muscle size and structure from the relative size of bones and joints. We know some things about sounds based on resonance chambers in the skulls of some dinosaurs, similar to how you could tell that a tuba makes lower notes than a trumpet without playing them.
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