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What modern animals would look like if we drew them in the same way as dinosaurs

167 points by andyxor 5y ago

therealdrag0 5y ago
Related podcast/article. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-art-redux/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-a...
popsie 5y ago
This is wildly inaccurate to the point that I would consider asking for this list to be taken down. We know a lot about how the muscles sits on bone, how different bone density and shapes affect strength and thus possible uses. We can also draw a lot from reptiles and living dinosaurs (birds) by looking at analogous structures that are widely present in existing animals. This sort of news has been going around the Brazilian internet for quite a while to the point that a fairly well known paleontologist and science communication showed the process of how this reconstruction would be made (video, in portuguese: https://youtu.be/8TPPFcZpCbA https://youtu.be/8TPPFcZpCbA)
- msrenee 5y ago
  Why, when trying to determine what an ancient reptile looked like, would you use mammal species for all your references? Just in my experience, reptiles tend to have fat deposits in different configurations to mammals.
- popsie 5y ago
  Since there's a hippo in the article as well, here are some major points: - From the teeth shape and abrasion patterns we can tell that this was a herbivorous animal. - Muscle attachment points intm the jaw and huge concave regions suggests large and powerful jaw muscles, so the hollow skinny picture in the article is not viable. - Being a herbivore with powerful jaw muscles, this animal would need to chew on food a lot. Without cheeks, food would fall out as the animal chews, so it clearly has cheeks. - Eyew need to fit in the ocular orbit, so they're not tint dots, they're large eyes. - if we knew any surviving mammal, we would know this animal probably had eyelids (all mammals do). - This head is huge and heavy, so we'll need a bunch of muscles to keep it up, so this animal has a chunky neck as well. You can see what the reconstruction would look like with this info at ~40 minutes into the video.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > This is wildly inaccurate to the point that I would consider asking for this list to be taken down. It's the Daily Mail - wild inaccuracy goes without saying.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Actually I’m surprised to see anything from the daily Mail posted here. I would have guessed it was on a block list.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      Well, let's not go nuts. It is almost certainly the worst newspaper in the world, read only by the racist tubs of lard seen capering around Wembley at the weekend. But censorship is even worse.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      It may not be true, but I swear there’s been an uptick in submissions from tabloid-like sites in the past year.
NotSwift 5y ago
One point that most illustration of the old dinosaurs probably get wrong is the lack of feathers. After all, all current dinosaurs have feathers (Yes birds are technically dinosaurs) and it seems reasonable to assume that some of their ancestors had them too. Unfortunately, unlike bones, feathers do not fossilize really well, so we cannot easily determine which species had them. The most likely reason dinosaurs developed feathers is thermal insulation, just like why mammals developed hair.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  We have enough fossils of "things that don't fossilize well" that if dinosaurs were feathered by default we'd know about it.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Last I checked back in on my childhood obsession of paleontology, consensus was that a whole lot more theropods were at least partially feathered, at least at some life stages, than previously thought, including some of the big ones, but there's not evidence that many other categories of dinosaur were feathered.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      AFAIK that's still correct. The dinosaurs from which birds are descended are thought to have feathers or something similar, in some case or at some stages of life. But that's a really long way from being the default or even a sizeable enough majority that one could say "the dinosaurs had feathers" as a generalization and do so with a straight face.
- cwmma 5y ago
  that being said there is a pretty good chance a lot of the bigger dinosaurs (e.g. t. rex) probably did not have many feathers similar to how rhinos, elephants and other large mammals don't (but hey mammoths did so so it's probably not none)
BoxOfRain 5y ago
I know it’s the Daily Mail so it goes with the territory, but that website is truly obnoxious on mobile. It’s a masterclass in why having multiple content-covering boxes which are hard to dismiss is a stupid idea.
yakubin 5y ago
> He believes Hollywood is to blame for giving dinosaurs their skeletal 'monster' image. I don't think most dinosaurs are seen as monsters. When it comes to public relations "monsters", I think it's mostly T-Rex, and usually it isn't portrayed as skeletal. Depictions of most dinosaurs make them look cute.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  It's older than Hollywood. Early attempts to rationalize geological time with Genesis located dinosaurs in a pre-Adamic world of eternal darkness. Really interesting article about this: Terrible lizards and the wrath of God: How 19th century Christianity and Romanticism affected visual representations of dinosaurs and our perceptions of the ancient world: https://web.archive.org/web/20200905194215/https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Peterson_Hum_2012.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200905194215/https://web.stanf...
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    That certainly squares with H.P. Lovecraft's "Antediluvian horrors".
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    Pagan big reptiles weren't nice either, were they? Tiamat, Nidhogg, Jormungandr, Hydra, Fafnir.
hprotagonist 5y ago
the classic "we can't prove they weren't huge fatbirds": https://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/111317780763/nebu-kuro https://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/111317780763/nebu-kuro
- bitwize 5y ago
  I'm not sure that being eaten by a giant toothed finch would be any less scary than being eaten by the lizard-thing we're used to.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Surely this T-Rex would spontaneously combust from the heat retention.
- genericone 5y ago
  Related/Unrelated: https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/1418450360/2014/02/1418450360_3166716099001_Chicken.mp4 https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/1418450360/2014/02/1418...
everdrive 5y ago
>A scary looking baboon re-imagined from its skeleton - it appears to have a dinosaur-like tail Baboons are terrifying in any context.
- danellis 5y ago
  They're quite enjoyable in the context of being in a car with the windows rolled up.
  - baboonincar 5y ago
    Like INSIDE the car? That sounds terrifying!
yorwba 5y ago
I didn't see the artist's website linked in the article, so here it is: http://cmkosemen.com/ http://cmkosemen.com/
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Is this just meant to be silly for the fun of it? Or is it meant to suggest our real extrapolations are probably as ridiculous as these things are? If we have even a single mud impression somehere, and we do, then this implication is DailyMail, I mean garbage. Similarly, unless you take an artist who currently draws dinosaurs to the best of their ability with all current anatomical understanding, and THEY produce these drawings from a monkey etc, then again, DailyMail, I mean garbage. "These drawings I made are stupid" on no way proves that "therefor those drawings you made are stupid."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
93po 5y ago
Would be more accurate if it was just titled "Mammals look weird if we draw them as if they were reptiles instead".
obloid 5y ago
These images are from the book "All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Yes and the authors of that book are a paleontologist and an illustrator who specializes in paleontology. The book was intended by them to cause people to question some of our assumptions and also as an entertaining look at some bizarre illustrations. They do not actually espouse any radical ideas about the actual appearance of Dinosaurs. Like most mainstream paleontologist, they do see to believe that some or most members of the theropods could have had some amount of feathers. They seem open to the idea that other dinosaur groups and possibly archosaurs may have had something like feathers in some cases. The have a podcast that I listen to frequently “Tetrapods Zoology Podcast”. It is interesting, informative, and tedious in places because… they are scientists acting a bit goofy but still scientists.
juliushuijnk 5y ago
Eons video about the history of how dinosaurs have been drawn, including the mistakes and why they were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE
shwoopdiwoop 5y ago
Can we just ban Daily Mail articles altogether from this site please? I’m all for discovering all sorts of curious things but this website and its content is just pure garbage.

167 points by andyxor 5y ago

Related podcast/article. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-art-redux/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-a...

popsie 5y ago

This is wildly inaccurate to the point that I would consider asking for this list to be taken down. We know a lot about how the muscles sits on bone, how different bone density and shapes affect strength and thus possible uses. We can also draw a lot from reptiles and living dinosaurs (birds) by looking at analogous structures that are widely present in existing animals. This sort of news has been going around the Brazilian internet for quite a while to the point that a fairly well known paleontologist and science communication showed the process of how this reconstruction would be made (video, in portuguese: https://youtu.be/8TPPFcZpCbA https://youtu.be/8TPPFcZpCbA)

msrenee 5y ago
Why, when trying to determine what an ancient reptile looked like, would you use mammal species for all your references? Just in my experience, reptiles tend to have fat deposits in different configurations to mammals.
popsie 5y ago
Since there's a hippo in the article as well, here are some major points: - From the teeth shape and abrasion patterns we can tell that this was a herbivorous animal. - Muscle attachment points intm the jaw and huge concave regions suggests large and powerful jaw muscles, so the hollow skinny picture in the article is not viable. - Being a herbivore with powerful jaw muscles, this animal would need to chew on food a lot. Without cheeks, food would fall out as the animal chews, so it clearly has cheeks. - Eyew need to fit in the ocular orbit, so they're not tint dots, they're large eyes. - if we knew any surviving mammal, we would know this animal probably had eyelids (all mammals do). - This head is huge and heavy, so we'll need a bunch of muscles to keep it up, so this animal has a chunky neck as well. You can see what the reconstruction would look like with this info at ~40 minutes into the video.
zabzonk 5y ago
> This is wildly inaccurate to the point that I would consider asking for this list to be taken down. It's the Daily Mail - wild inaccuracy goes without saying.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Actually I’m surprised to see anything from the daily Mail posted here. I would have guessed it was on a block list.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    Well, let's not go nuts. It is almost certainly the worst newspaper in the world, read only by the racist tubs of lard seen capering around Wembley at the weekend. But censorship is even worse.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    It may not be true, but I swear there’s been an uptick in submissions from tabloid-like sites in the past year.

NotSwift 5y ago

One point that most illustration of the old dinosaurs probably get wrong is the lack of feathers. After all, all current dinosaurs have feathers (Yes birds are technically dinosaurs) and it seems reasonable to assume that some of their ancestors had them too. Unfortunately, unlike bones, feathers do not fossilize really well, so we cannot easily determine which species had them. The most likely reason dinosaurs developed feathers is thermal insulation, just like why mammals developed hair.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
We have enough fossils of "things that don't fossilize well" that if dinosaurs were feathered by default we'd know about it.
- handrous 5y ago
  Last I checked back in on my childhood obsession of paleontology, consensus was that a whole lot more theropods were at least partially feathered, at least at some life stages, than previously thought, including some of the big ones, but there's not evidence that many other categories of dinosaur were feathered.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    AFAIK that's still correct. The dinosaurs from which birds are descended are thought to have feathers or something similar, in some case or at some stages of life. But that's a really long way from being the default or even a sizeable enough majority that one could say "the dinosaurs had feathers" as a generalization and do so with a straight face.
cwmma 5y ago
that being said there is a pretty good chance a lot of the bigger dinosaurs (e.g. t. rex) probably did not have many feathers similar to how rhinos, elephants and other large mammals don't (but hey mammoths did so so it's probably not none)

BoxOfRain 5y ago

I know it’s the Daily Mail so it goes with the territory, but that website is truly obnoxious on mobile. It’s a masterclass in why having multiple content-covering boxes which are hard to dismiss is a stupid idea.

yakubin 5y ago

> He believes Hollywood is to blame for giving dinosaurs their skeletal 'monster' image. I don't think most dinosaurs are seen as monsters. When it comes to public relations "monsters", I think it's mostly T-Rex, and usually it isn't portrayed as skeletal. Depictions of most dinosaurs make them look cute.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago
It's older than Hollywood. Early attempts to rationalize geological time with Genesis located dinosaurs in a pre-Adamic world of eternal darkness. Really interesting article about this: Terrible lizards and the wrath of God: How 19th century Christianity and Romanticism affected visual representations of dinosaurs and our perceptions of the ancient world: https://web.archive.org/web/20200905194215/https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Peterson_Hum_2012.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20200905194215/https://web.stanf...
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  That certainly squares with H.P. Lovecraft's "Antediluvian horrors".
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  Pagan big reptiles weren't nice either, were they? Tiamat, Nidhogg, Jormungandr, Hydra, Fafnir.

hprotagonist 5y ago

the classic "we can't prove they weren't huge fatbirds": https://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/111317780763/nebu-kuro https://coelasquid.tumblr.com/post/111317780763/nebu-kuro

bitwize 5y ago
I'm not sure that being eaten by a giant toothed finch would be any less scary than being eaten by the lizard-thing we're used to.
renewiltord 5y ago
Surely this T-Rex would spontaneously combust from the heat retention.
genericone 5y ago
Related/Unrelated: https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/1418450360/2014/02/1418450360_3166716099001_Chicken.mp4 https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/1418450360/2014/02/1418...

everdrive 5y ago

>A scary looking baboon re-imagined from its skeleton - it appears to have a dinosaur-like tail Baboons are terrifying in any context.

danellis 5y ago
They're quite enjoyable in the context of being in a car with the windows rolled up.
- baboonincar 5y ago
  Like INSIDE the car? That sounds terrifying!

yorwba 5y ago

I didn't see the artist's website linked in the article, so here it is: http://cmkosemen.com/ http://cmkosemen.com/

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Is this just meant to be silly for the fun of it? Or is it meant to suggest our real extrapolations are probably as ridiculous as these things are? If we have even a single mud impression somehere, and we do, then this implication is DailyMail, I mean garbage. Similarly, unless you take an artist who currently draws dinosaurs to the best of their ability with all current anatomical understanding, and THEY produce these drawings from a monkey etc, then again, DailyMail, I mean garbage. "These drawings I made are stupid" on no way proves that "therefor those drawings you made are stupid."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

93po 5y ago

Would be more accurate if it was just titled "Mammals look weird if we draw them as if they were reptiles instead".

obloid 5y ago

These images are from the book "All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays

Tagbert 5y ago
Yes and the authors of that book are a paleontologist and an illustrator who specializes in paleontology. The book was intended by them to cause people to question some of our assumptions and also as an entertaining look at some bizarre illustrations. They do not actually espouse any radical ideas about the actual appearance of Dinosaurs. Like most mainstream paleontologist, they do see to believe that some or most members of the theropods could have had some amount of feathers. They seem open to the idea that other dinosaur groups and possibly archosaurs may have had something like feathers in some cases. The have a podcast that I listen to frequently “Tetrapods Zoology Podcast”. It is interesting, informative, and tedious in places because… they are scientists acting a bit goofy but still scientists.

juliushuijnk 5y ago

Eons video about the history of how dinosaurs have been drawn, including the mistakes and why they were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE

shwoopdiwoop 5y ago

Can we just ban Daily Mail articles altogether from this site please? I’m all for discovering all sorts of curious things but this website and its content is just pure garbage.