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I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. But a high definition video is what

I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real. Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u I feel that is the difference.

runarberg 6y ago
I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover. I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.
corin_ 6y ago
> I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. It's possible to see recreations of extinct animals that humans have overlapped with enough to write and draw how they looked. It's even possible to see real specimens of extinct creations, such as the Oxford Dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo You don't need much more knowledge, but definitely more than "they don't exist today". But equally with colourised photos/video: you don't need more knowledge than "this was filmed before it was possible to film in colour, so all colours are guesses".

runarberg 6y ago

I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover. I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.

corin_ 6y ago

> I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. It's possible to see recreations of extinct animals that humans have overlapped with enough to write and draw how they looked. It's even possible to see real specimens of extinct creations, such as the Oxford Dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo You don't need much more knowledge, but definitely more than "they don't exist today". But equally with colourised photos/video: you don't need more knowledge than "this was filmed before it was possible to film in colour, so all colours are guesses".