i’d say these days paleo art is more “okay so we know what related animals look like, and we know what animals in the same general niche look like, so let’s use those to fill in the blanks from the skeleton and make something that looks like you could find it in the wild”
honestly i feel like many people are quite a bit too generous towards people of the past, people just really liked to write fanfiction with fossils as the base for a lot of the history of paleontology… Basically like what jurassic park did but they passed it of as enlightened science, conveniently forgetting to tell people that they just went ahead and moved a bone found near the legs up to the nose…
Certainly there was genuine attempts to recreate dinosaurs, but good lord a lot of it is just obviously biased, lord forbid dinosaurs not be portrayed as sluggish obsolete monsters!
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
We know from the bones many things such as the weight the animal could support and how they walked indicating how they balanced. Depending on the age and sediment the animal might have even left a pretty good outline, and in highly alkaline conditions some saponified tissue would remain (completely denatured, but the shape would be there).
The creature in the OP meme for example was a hind-legged walker, so it couldn’t be too front heavy and it’s front paws weren’t heavy weight-bearing.
HOWEVER! This interpretation can change! Originally only two Spinosaurus specimen were collected in very small number of bones with which to make recreations, due to difficulties in and around the region of Egypt. It can be very difficult for archeologists to make digs given their history with the region and the local extremist factions who oppose the concept of things like dinosaurs and ancient cultures. Recently a 2014 study which looked at one particular rock proposed the Spinosaurus tail was webbed, indicating it was semi-aquatic, which would have an impact on weight distribution of the animal and support the idea of a more bouyant build.