Source?
Comment on xkcd #2990: Late Cenozoic
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you go to a museum and see an impressive skeleton of a dinosaur, you’re not actually looking at dinosaur bones. And no, I don’t mean because they’ve calcified and become “rock”. I mean the real bones are in a drawer somewhere, if they even exist. What you’re looking at is plaster, often with many of the pieces wholly created from scratch in order to produce a full skeleton.
Shanedino@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
He is talking about fossils, they are not bones, just imprint of them.
Shanedino@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No he is not and he clearly states that. You clearly didn’t read the comment, just glanced at it.
Belgdore@lemm.ee 1 month ago
You’re getting awfully close to sounding like the psychos who say that all fossils are invented or placed on earth by the devil to confuse humanity about the age of the earth.
Most mounted dinosaur skeletons contain real fossils. Many museums have diagrams showing which are real and which are recreations of fossils that were missing or too damaged to mount for each specimen.
Paleontologists can determine what the missing fossils looked like based on other specimens and looking at what they have in context of other similar species that have more complete skeletons.