Exactly my thoughts! And I'm WAY more optimistic than the rest of your replies right now. I had the thought looking at that picture of the hippo- it's got tho

Exactly my thoughts! And I'm WAY more optimistic than the rest of your replies right now. I had the thought looking at that picture of the hippo- it's got those hornlike[1] jaw projections and that got me thinking about how features on the bones must relate back to cartilage, musculature and vasculature overlying them. Deep learning would excel at categorizing all those things! Paleontologists could tweak the models to lean more towards avian, reptile, mammal or fishlike characteristics given the clade and traits of the animals. I know some dinosaurs are known to be colder or warmer blooded, or have hollow bones like birds. You could probably get decent results just with models/pictures of skeletons and live animals, but I think MRI scans would be ideal- the model could learn to extrapolate actual structures of different tissues directly, and you could model things that don't exist in combination today. Birdlike musculature, body fat and skin over complex cartilaginous structures, with muscle traits of more cold-blooded animals. There are many zoos with MRI machines, even extra-large ones used for large animals. I wonder how much of that dataset could be assembled? You don't even need very high resolution, centimeters would be plenty for something the size of a horse. Millimeters would be perfect for anything bigger than a sparrow! [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Hippo_skull_dark.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Hippo_sk...