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Guys, palaeontology is not some big fun guessing game. We’re not pulling things out of our ass for fun. We have a LOT of ways to tell what an extinct animal may have looked like. Everything from scars on bones, mathematic calculations on load bearing, soft tissue impressions, understanding modern biology, signs of rate of growth, preserved organic materials – we can tell a LOT from fossils. We can get pretty good ideas of how things probably looked. We can definitely get a broad idea of an animal, its shape, its size. Even things like colour, patterning, and integument follow recognisable rules and trends. Maybe we can’t get everything absolutely certain, and maybe there are some areas we’re questioning, but we do have ideas grounded in reasonable assumptions.
No, T. rex did not look like a round, soft bird. No, plesiosaurs were not penguin shaped. No, a Triceratops was probably not bright pink and purple all over, and no, Brachiosaurus could never have had a trunk. These are things we absolutely can and do know.
Palaeontology is a science, and treating it like some experiment in imagination just harms an already misunderstood and looked-down-on field. Especially when our science is so often talked over or ignored by people who want to make animals “cool” or “scary” or “retro”. Please. Understand the intricacies here and stop acting like our study means nothing.
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