How do we know what dinosaurs look and sound like?
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We don’t really know. We’re just guessing based on their relationship to the animals we have today, and the environment they lived in.
Since they’re related to birds, they likely had feathers. They didn’t look like giant lizards: Jurassic Park encouraged that image.
We aren’t sure these are just the best guesses using the available information, we could be wrong and some of them like how they stand and use their tails has changed.
We don’t, but we can draw parallels to living creatures of today, and occasionally make scientific breakthroughs.
For example finding frozen pieces of dinosaur skin with feathers reinforced the “birds are modern dinosaurs” theory in public eyes, so now many artists give them a bird-like appearance instead of lizard-like.
For looks we can infer the shape of them from bones. If a bone is whatever size and thickness we can infer the muscles attached to it were whatever size, so we can work out the probable shape of the dinosaur from that. There are grooves on bones for tendons so we can work out where the muscles attached and how the muscles would have moved so from that we can calculate the angles the legs moved at etc.
For the skin, we have some impressions of the skin and we can extrapolate from that. Same with the feathers.
For what they sound like, that’s a bit less certain. We can assume the probable size of the larynx from the size of the bones around it, so we can assume a big larynx gives a deep sound and small gives a high pitched. But mostly it is a guess based on similar animals, birds and reptiles, alive now.
Most of them had feathers and there’s a certain thing in feathers that allows us to tell what color they were. We can deduce the vocalizations based on skeletal structure but we aren’t sure about that part.
They slowly change as we get more information, but most likely we’re still wrong. Check out this article:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7754553/Nightmarish-sketches-reveal-modern-animals-look-like-drew-based-skeletons.html
We don’t for the most part.
We have some idea what they look like because of fossils of skeletons and even some rare bits of feather and skin and in a few very rare cases even pigments.
We have no idea what they sounded like and what their behavior might have been.
We can make some guesses by comparing them with living relatives like birds and crocodilians, and other living animals with similar physical structures, but most of them is educated guess work.
For all anyone knows T-Rex was covered in fluffy yellow feathers and chirped like a very loud canary.
For looks we are finding more and more information. We have found skin imprints for Velociraptors, so we know they had feathers. We have some skin imprints for T Rex, so we know they didn’t have feathers, as least for most of the body.
A famous “mummified” armored dinosaur shows us nearly everything in great detail, at least for that species.
We are even starting to learn about colors! Some feather impressions still had some pigment remaining, revealing that a few species had reddish-brown, white and black feathers.
For sounds we are guessing more. Some dinosaurs had crests; assuming these were used for vocalization we can model how they would sound. Using birds as a reference we can guess at more sounds.
So we learn more all the time. Some well preserved fossil is discovered and we can learn a lot quickly.
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