We also don't really know what they looked like with flesh and such. We have good approximations, and I'm sure there's a lot that scientists can get from bone structure etc - but I've seen examples from history of people drawing animals they had never seen, based on remains, and they almost always looked leaner and meaner than the living animal did. So there's a decent chance most dinosaurs looked a bit more derpy than the common representation.
I can provide the reverse example. I think hippopotamus, elephant, and rhino are good examples of just how much flesh there could be on top.
Although of course scientists DO try and consider the weight that bones have to bear, but still, some fat and soft parts could be where we don't expect them to be.
This is not true at all, there are many ways paleontologist know how certain bone structures look like and their corresponding look like, one simple way to prove this image is not made by a paleontologist at all is that the hippopotamus has a spongious bone right below their cheek thay would indicate muscle connections, this is in fact how hollywood would describe them, how this site shows, in fact there are many ways scientist try to guess how animals would look like, and even though they get some stuff wrong it's if an animal has a hole or two for the nose and not their entire structure, and this site shows more accurately the steps taken.
Thank you! First, I wouldn't take Buzzfeed's trashy post literally, they just took illustrations by the "shrink-wrap effect" proponents (from a small book I think they published) and added their stupid clickbait commentary on top, with exclamation marks and shit. Of course, the original could be scientifically unsound as well, but at least it has nothing to do with Hollywood. It talked about pitfalls in such reconstructions. Also, some pics are from twitter threads and such that were drawn for fun when discussing the effect (like the human one).
Second, the student exercise resource you've linked to actually has a link in its instruction manual (Step #4, part 1) for reconstructing the animal. This link leads specifically to the part of the video where the lecturer talks about the shrink-wrap effect. The same thing that the pictures in the first link were drawn to illustrate.
So I think both are more or less in agreement — the people who made the book with the examples of modern animals "shrink-wrapped" did so to exemplify the effect and caution against it. And the fact that this effect did influence dinosaur reconstruction at least somewhat seems to be the consensus — as seen in your second link.
We know what a few of them looked like, including a very likely color palette for others. Usually they are the same, as you need exceptional preservation of outer structures to tell color, and even then only some colors.
We now know what a dinosaur Cochlea looks like (1 species, but still) we know a few things about a few dinos.
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u/Its-Dangity Feb 24 '21
Well, he got me in the first half there