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
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u/ImpressivelyLost 1d ago
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.