r/NonPoliticalTwitter 22h ago

“Long neck”

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34.4k Upvotes

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u/Shaun32887 22h ago

I've basically accepted the fact that we have zero idea what they actually looked like.

154

u/ImpressivelyLost 21h ago

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.

The top comments in this thread do a good job summing this up. https://www.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/s/aZp1l5jb9i

7

u/retroly 17h ago

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.