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.
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