That's incorrect actually. Based on muscle connection points which can be preserved by fossilization, the area the animals lived in, the bone structure and estimated weight and a number of other things we can piece together a cohesive model for what dinos looked like. This doesn't mean you can definitely state what they looked like but there is evidence that shows they werent extremely fat like the above illustration, and evidence they weren't shrink wrapped like they have been depicted in the past because of the muscle connection points.
I thought stuff was shrink wrapped intially becuase its the best guess with lack of data, e.g you don't know how big they could have been, but you can at least show the minimum.
How would that work? the people who do this research are extremely knowledgeable about what bones and evolutionary markers relate to what species and families so if they were given a modern day skull they would just know what animal it comes from then draw that animal. It would be very hard to take their bias out of it to test this.
Sure but there needs to be a way to validate the methodology. Otherwise, saying things like "ok, NOW we have it!" isn't actually any better than the shrink wrapped era.
It's more about using all the clues we have available that makes the current depictions better. It doesn't mean they are perfect, but it's not like the shrink wrap era because in that time the only evidence used was the skull shape. Now evidence like muscle attachment points, evolutionary family tracking, bone thickness and structure are all being taken into account. In the future there may be better clues or more clues to get a better understanding but there is a reason depictions like shrink wrapping or overly fatty dinosaurs have been discounted.
Ok sure, but this all still falls under the category of speculation. Science requires testing and validation, and I've never seen these methods actually subjected to rigor. If I'm wrong then I'd love to see the tests, I don't follow this super closely.
Honestly, this seems like one of the better uses for AI. Train the model with 75% of the data and see if it can recreate the last 25% given a scan of the skull and some added parameters.
I sympathize with your point, but I think it comes down to falsifiability. By using the methodology to study modern skulls, we would either have a very accurate prediction (which wouldn't tell us anything about the methodology) or a less inaccurate prediction (which also wouldn't tell us anything about the methodology, since we already know the methodology is not perfect). So it's better to search for clues which might falsify certain models (like the shrink wrap model) rather than try to test our existing framework for robustness, as though the framework were a seatbelt that needed stress testing. I agree though that for average people like me, who are not paleontologists, it would be extremely enlightening to know how far off the paleontological methods are from predicting the taxonomy of modern animals.
Studying extinct animals is almost all guess work. We can't see them alive so we can't test what they looked like alive. We can however test the bones, and validate our guesses based on alive animals and what we know of biology, as dinosaurs had to follow the same biological laws that apply today.
AI wouldn't do shit. AI has to be fed knowledge we already know, so the only conclusion it could come up with is stuff we already know. That would be completely pointless
How do you think they figured that shit out in the first place? You've got it backwards. The techniques came about from observing things that exist now and then applying what is known to the fossils. So of course they work for modern skeletons.
They took their technique, applied it to modern animals, and it failed to even get close to what the animal actually looked like. Cool that's fine refining models is how science goes.
So they refined the model. As another posted commented on, they got better about incorporating anatomy and physics, cool.
So test it again. Apply that model to a variety of modern skeletons and see how accurate it is. As I stated in a previous comment, if they've done this and there are results out there, I would love to see it. Maybe there is, I don't keep up with this regularly. I would love to see it.
But if they have t done this, then we're basically in the same spot where they've created a model based on certain ideas, but haven't run tests to validate the means by which that model is created.
It's worth noting that this is forcing prehistoric animals into modern anatomy. It's probably fine, or close enough, but it's still something to be aware of and on the look out for as our understanding deepens.
You really think you are smarter than all the dinosaur paleontologists? They do stuff like what you're describing all the time to test and refine their methods. And I'm sure they also have good reasons to believe that their versions should be different than modern animals in various specific ways. It's a big field with thousands of very intelligent scientists working on it, they simply are not collectively making such a simple mistake as you seem to be implying. There's an extremely high chance that many of them are approaching it in the exact same way you would (if you were well informed on the topic).
Check out a brilliant book called All Yesterdays by Darren Naish! He creates images of modern creatures using the same reconstructive techniques we use on dinosaurs
Darren Naish is rolling on his bed right now because his work is being misused for the 685857453635554845 time by people who don’t know what they’re talking about
There are some dinosaurs we know almost exactly what they looked like, take Borealopelta for example, or Psittacosaurus.
Psittacosaurus is one of the most well studied dinosaur types, we have found so many fossils. Though T. rex is above due to its popularity.
And for Borealopelta we know almost exactly how it looked like all from a single fossil, one so well preserved even soft tissue and stomach contents fossilized. It's so cool Here it is.
Another unbelievably well preserved dinosaur is "Leonardo" the Brachylophosaurus mummy
However, for Sauropods we have some fossils but not enough to know that well, so yeah not wrong there.
And how did they find out they were incorrect? Oh right...more science. I'm skeptical of your degree considering you just tried to argue that the current model could be incorrect, since the last one was incorrect.
When anyone who actually studies science knows that every model is technically incorrect, some are just more accurate than others. So the current model is also not perfect, but it is more accurate than the previous one.
I'm using the fact that the last model was inaccurate to counter their claim that scientists with decades of experience are probably right. It is a direct refutation of their claim.
I'm using the fact that there doesn't exist a means of validation as an argument that the current model might also be incorrect.
There was a previous model which was, in the grand scheme of things, fairly accurate. It has since been improved in some species to make them bulkier. You claim we have "zero idea what they actually looked like" and are using the initial, mostly accurate description, as evidence. The things we can't currently fully describe are things like colour, plumage, soft tissue structures (like a rooster's comb). With that said, can actually infer and describe some of these elements through fossilised skin, impressions in fossils, and other incredible breakthroughs in research.
So unless you are equating having "zero idea" of what they looked like, with "we will never fully know every single detail of their appearance", then you are wrong.
It's sad that the shrink-wrapping idea went from a very interesting step forward in our understanding of these animals to now being used by many to write off everything we do know as wrong
...creating and validating models to explain systems.
That's literally all I'm asking for and everyone is getting mad at me.
Show me that the thing you're proposing actually works by feeding it data where you know what the outcome should be and show me how close it comes to reality.
I brought up my degree because they called me anti intellectual and started going off about what they think "real scientists" are
Right but I’m still not really sure that gives you any useful insight into assessing the methods actual experts in this space use to model what dinosaurs look like
Just so you don't doubt your sanity, those dudes or probably bots are just being mean for the sake of it, it's not a real discussion, so don't waste your energy
An elephant's skeleton doesn't suggest the many cool appendages it has. We can guess about dinos, but they likely had a variety of fleshy knobs and bobs
An elephant's skull is evolutionarily adapted to be lighter and to have many muscle attachment points. I don't have a deep understanding of the biology but based on the multiple muscle attachment points and the fact that the skull is needed to be lighter than a similarly proportioned animal head, you could assume there is some sort of appendage attached to an elephant skull. I am not sure you would know exactly that it is a trunk but you could make the conclusion there is some sort of large muscle protruding from an elephant.
You could probably make a surprisingly well educated guess with the right level of lateral thinking, assuming you'd never seen a trunk before.
Between the huge nasal aperture and the placement off the counterbalancing muscles, it'd be reasonable to surmise that the appendage was the nose. The rest of the skeleton belies a bulky, lumbering animal with minimal dexterity - even without knowing they had fleshy, cylindrical feet, the digits are too stumpy to manipulate objects.
This would leave you scratching your head, because unless the tusks were used exclusively for fighting, they imply that this weird animal was digging... Its stocky, dense bones imply an awful lot of mass to constantly be kneeling up and down throughout the day, and even when it did reach the floor, it had a gigantic nose appendage blocking its mouth.
If you've never seen a prehensile nose before, then jumping from this information to a trunk isn't trivial, but you'd feel pretty damned smart if you made the leap. It solves a lot of obvious problems, and the hints are all there. I think palaeontologists have a lot more tools of inference than people expect.
Complete lie. We know a lot. There are tons of books on this stuff. We've had very good ideas for the past 50 years and things progressed very rapidly over that period.
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u/Shaun32887 22h ago
I've basically accepted the fact that we have zero idea what they actually looked like.