Our knowledge of dinosaurs is evolving. Here is how we describe them – Quartz

Earlier this month, the American Museum of Natural History in New York inaugurated its latest exhibition (paywall) on the favorite dinosaur of all: the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex. Throughout the summer of 2020, visitors will be able to enjoy their teeth, their claws and, yes, their huge feathers.

That's right, feathers. The Conservatives wanted to make sure their representations of T. Rex corresponded to the most recent science, which suggests that the creature had feathers and maybe honked.

AP / Bebeto Matthews Photo

If you noticed that dinosaurs start to appear less ferocious than at the time of Jurassic Park, you are right. But this change is only the latest in a series of changes in the way that scientific artists have described dinosaurs since the 1960s. The more scientists learn about animals and their likely lives, the more their artistic talent has also evolved.

Dinosaurs had little interest in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of evidence from their fossilized skeletons, scientists have blamed them for their own extinction. The assumption was that large, heavy creatures were not made to survive. We now know that a huge asteroid crashed against the planet (the wall of payment) was at the origin of their disappearance.

The first representations of the creatures were unimaginative. "The path brontosaurus and Diplodocus The biggest dinosaurs have been illustrated. They looked like giant, gray vacuums with very, very short legs, "said paleontologist and paleo-artist Bob Bakker in the 99% Invisible podcast last October.

While studying paleontology in Baku in the 1960s, one of his teachers took him to collect fossils from Deinonychus, a smaller carnivorous dinosaur. The teacher, Jon Ostrom, led him to believe that dinosaurs probably behaved differently from the paleontologists' beliefs. Instead of looking more like modern lizards with a tail trailing behind them, Bakker and Ostrom began to think that the dinosaurs might have looked more like birds, with musculature similar to that of the animals of today. hui.

Although they were not the first paleontologists to think of dinosaurs in this way, Bakker was one of the first to draw dinosaurs as lean and medium machines for eating meat. His drawings, combined with growing evidence of the high activity of dinosaurs, led to increasingly fierce depictions of ancient creatures in the 1960s and 1970s. Jurassic Park released in 1993, there was no question of the finesse of these creatures.

But in the two decades since the publication of the blockbuster, dinosaur representations have changed even more. The artists understood that they were drawing dinosaurs only from skeletons. Although their drawings are accurate on the basis of these skeletons, all animals offer much more than their muscles and bones. They have all kinds of soft tissues like skin and fat that can change their appearance and do not keep well in fossils.

"To have an overview of the dinosaurs, I think it takes a fair amount of speculation," said John Conway, artist and co-author of the book. Everyday: unique and speculative views of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, says the podcast.

In Every yearConway and others have tried to draw dinosaurs in a scientifically accurate way, based on the latest studies, but by including more speculative information about the behavior of creatures, likely to inform their appearance. For example, a Triceratops may have had thorns all along his back, in addition to the three thorny horns on his head. The goal is not necessarily to be perfectly correct, but rather to show that scientists do not have all the information about the appearance of dinosaurs.

As paleontologists continue to make discoveries of ancient creatures, their vision will change as well. While T. Rex Feathers can have fine, coarse feathers in our representations now. Maybe scientists may discover later that they were probably lighter or even more colorful than we suppose today.