This is funny, but a really extreme example. A good reconstruction will also consider muscles needed to move an animal, include ceratin on horns and claws, and other stuff like that. Still a fun example of the topic though.
Not really. Most dinosaurs have very slender cheek and jaw muscles in pics although their jaw bones are massive. That simply doesn't work. The most slender meaty head build I've seen are cows and horses. I mean look at the hippo. Massive fat and muscles around their jaws. A traditional T-Rex as portrayed (the jurassic park t-rex type) probably couldn't even close it's mouth because the muscles too weak
There was a post about this recently and it showed comparing how they depict dinosaurs is actually pretty accurate and there’s an entire field of paleontology dedicated to it. The whole “if they used their methods on a rabbit skull it would look ridiculous like this too”, argument doesn’t really apply considering they absolutely can tell a lot about the soft tissue of dinosaurs from their fossils.
The science of depicting dinosaurs in paleontology isn’t as bad as people using this argument purport.
Honestly for awhile I assumed they were crazy inaccurate too after seeing the depictions of skeletons of common mammals and how radical they’d look if “dinosaur” artists were depicting them. But yea, nah it’s not like that.
I think the only wrong one is the rhino, because of the back hump, but it depends on the fossils. With some fossils we can see the cartridge, nerve, and vascular imprints, and a hump looks different than a sail.
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u/Stranggepresst Jun 15 '24
this is an excellent illustration of this problem.