
The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art - ctrlp
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dinosaurs-art-paleoartists-mistakes
======
amelius
Probably relevant: [1].

> The amazing dinosaur found (accidentally) by miners in Canada: known as a
> nodosaur, this 110 million-year-old, armored plant-eater is the best
> preserved fossil of its kind ever found.

[1]
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-
nodosaur-fossil-discovery/)

~~~
masklinn
Wow, I'd missed that one. It seems to match the ideas we had about them, but
what a gorgeous fossil.

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jandrese
One of my favorite Mangakas hilariously went full overfeather on a T-Rex.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGbedNNXkAIA0s0.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGbedNNXkAIA0s0.jpg)

~~~
thaumasiotes
For the curious, the notation 中身 on the lower image will mean something like
"inner body".

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krylon
The pictures of animals as interpreted by some future archaeology are very
interesting. As a child I went through a phase - I suspect many of us did -
where I gobbled up every bit of information on dinosaurs I could get. I never
thought about how difficult it is to reconstruct what an animal looked like
from its bones.

It is a little sad, because there are so many open questions and some of those
simply cannot be answered without a time machine. But at the same time, I am
happy that our understanding of dinosaurs is still evolving.

~~~
estebank
[https://xkcd.com/1747/](https://xkcd.com/1747/)

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dmead
In principle I agree, but our image of what dinosaurs look like are probably
closer to the truth than what we would have gotten had they just jumped to
adding soft tissue.

This is my bearded dragon's x-ray

[https://scontent-
lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/20819094_1010...](https://scontent-
lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/20819094_10102340751138068_1441931428537691081_o.jpg?oh=a1caaa2762fc890acb1ad7543f7285a0&oe=5AE6D3AA)

see all those facial features? That's how it's face looks, almost exactly. The
don't even have to use crocs to derive the "reptile skulls look like their
faces rule".

~~~
ch4s3
Many dinosaurs were related to modern birds, the rest were not reptiles
either.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I suppose what you're both saying speaks to the real issue - we lump all
dinosaurs into one single 'should look a bit like this' image.

It's a silly thing to do of course, humans don't much look like dolphins or
rats for instance but we're all mammals.

On the face of it that above statement seems a silly thing to say too, but it
speaks to the way we tend to just apply 'dinosaur' to an incredibly diverse
range of species that lived in multiple different environment right across the
planet and across hundreds of millions of years.

I think there's probably room to start to acknowledging that 'dinosaur' no
longer really can mean 'terrible lizard' and accept that it must speak to the
diversity of the species within the category.

~~~
ch4s3
Yeah, I was recently reading about this. It's amazing how diverse they were.
They basically dominated every niche across every ecosystem for 100s of
millions of years.

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odabaxok
It's funny, that I have just stumbled upon this yesterday:
[http://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/99186085698/as-cm-kosemen-
ex...](http://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/99186085698/as-cm-kosemen-explains-
throughout-all)

~~~
razorunreal
I guess we would know because animals don't tend to have much more bone than
they need. You should be able to estimate the mass of an animal based on the
size and structure of it's leg bones (and whether you think it lives it's
whole life in water). Then you assume it has enough muscle to move that mass,
which gives you an estimate of the density (and locations) of some of the
remainder. Split the rest between organs, fat and more muscle in proportions
that seem reasonable based on existing animals.

Then discover you're still surprisingly wrong, probably. But it should rule
out the pudgy T-Rex at least.

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anentropic
This article was disappointingly lacking examples of good contemporary
dinosaur art... had plenty of examples of errors

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ljf
I like watching history shows where they find an old human skull and then have
an artist/scientist add flesh - but I've always thought it would be great to
get a 3d model of MY skull and then ask the same - would it actually look
anything like me?

~~~
Sander_Marechal
Probably yes, considering that this technique has been used countless times to
identify remains.

~~~
nonbel
How do they know it is correct?

~~~
jandrese
Human facial reconstruction has the advantage of millions of examples of the
soft tissue to study before making the model. Dinosaur artists have zero real
life examples to work from so they have to make lots of guesses. For a long
time they were thought to be most closely related to reptiles so the artists
used modern lizards as a reference.

Now that we know many dinosaurs are most closely related to birds it is
causing a revolution in dinosaur art.

------
rthomas6
The reconstructions of most dinosaurs are just terrible. I've found that
artists do a much better job than scientists of creating realistic looking
animals. The good ones are no more or less speculative than the scientist
reconstructions, they just have more thought put into the coloring and how the
animal may have looked as it moved about and lived its life. Here are some
examples of dinosaurs as they may have actually looked by an artist named John
Conway. Quite different than how they're often portrayed:

* Velociraptor: [http://johnconway.co/images/medium/velociraptor-mongoliensis...](http://johnconway.co/images/medium/velociraptor-mongoliensis_ii.jpeg)

* Shuvuuia deserti: [http://johnconway.co/images/medium/shuvuuia-deserti.jpeg](http://johnconway.co/images/medium/shuvuuia-deserti.jpeg)

* Pterosaurs: [https://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/dinoart5.png](https://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/dinoart5.png)

~~~
iclelland
John Conway is actually one of the authors of the book discussed in the
article.

------
xixixao
These do make you wonder: Elephant's skeleton and outline:
[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yTfzpcnAjU0/TugXUt4MMqI/AAAAAAAAA...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yTfzpcnAjU0/TugXUt4MMqI/AAAAAAAAAmQ/xfVaYiEGG7E/s1600/elephant_skeleton.jpg)
T. Rex's skeleton and outline:
[https://newsdesk.si.edu/sites/default/files/photos/Skeleton....](https://newsdesk.si.edu/sites/default/files/photos/Skeleton.jpg)

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pavel_lishin
Kosemen's "All Tomorrows" is also a fascinating art book, looking at a
possible future of humanity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrows)

~~~
inlined
As a matter of HN etiquette, whenever I recommend a book I always give an
Amazon referral link. It's a technique I picked up from an HN alum and gets me
in the mindset to always be selling.

Is that something that would have been discouraged on HN itself?

~~~
losteric
Feel free to suggest books you wrote, but I would look down on someone using
referral links to profit off their recommendations.

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didgeoridoo
That swan is a thing of nightmares.

~~~
jdmichal
If you've ever dealt with ornery swans, it mostly matches their personality...

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carlsborg
Do you think deep learning models could create this more accurately? The
training set would be known skeletal structures to fleshed out
representations.

~~~
fredley
You probably could, but I'm assuming there's just so many things that are
pretty arbitrary. Take for example a dog. We breed dogs to display a huge
number of differences, and only some of these are skeletal. From bones alone
there's no way to tell how jowly the muzzle of the dog is, or what colour and
length its hair, how musculature it is. Dogs are bred by humans, but many
species have extravagant, non-skeletal features use in mating displays that
are bred purely by arbitrary sexual selection and have nothing to do with
diet, climate, or any other factor you could determine from fossil remains.

~~~
_dan
Those are generally edge-cases, though. That evolve in situations where there
is little competition, and room for a little evolutionary inefficiency.

Although it's perfectly possible that dinosaurs were effectively massive birds
of paradise with ridiculous mating accoutrements...

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onychomys
Just a quick note: the article is from Sept 21st of last year. Can we get a
"(2017)" added onto the end of the title?

~~~
simias
Why? Do you think it's outdated?

~~~
onychomys
I'm friends with one of the authors of the book and was all excited to see
what I thought was a new interview about his work. :(

edit: and for more general reasons, because HN has a policy of identifying
things from previous years as such in their titles, whether they're still
relevant or not.

