how do we know what dinosaurs looked like?
In: Planetary Science
They’ve found bones, sometimes pretty-complete skeletons that can tell you the overall shape. If you study bones really carefully, you can find where the muscle tendons were attached and infer how strong/big those muscles were. And occasionally an animal dies and falls in mud or clay, and we end up with a fossil cast of what its skin looked like.
Combine all those clues, add in what we know about modern birds and reptiles, show your sketches to a bunch of colleagues and ask “what have I missed”…and you get the pretty-educated-guesses that are in our museums and books.
>how do we know what dinosaurs looked like?
We don’t! All we have is are best (and at this point, highly educated) guesses. Paleontologists reconstruct the appearance of dinosaurs using a range of approaches including fossil evidence (to work out size, shape, structure, as well as behaviours based on trace fossils such as footprints) and chemical analysis (e.g. the presence of certain pigments or proteins in fossils can indicate the colors of dinosaur skin or feathers) .
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