The thing is this push comes from paleontologists. And is based in those same new specimens with coloration, skin imprints, And soft tissue evidence. The headline image here is from “all yesterdays” a book written by paleontologists and evolutionary biologists precisely to point out how bad most paleoart is. And how little of it is driven by knowledge of actual anatomy. By offering purely speculative recreations There are birds who’s soft tissues are absolutely wild. And lizards too. Frills air sacks. Massive musculature. Sometimes vastly at odds with what the skeliton can tell us or would indicate. The reference to “fur” is not neccisarily to mammalian fur. But a sort of fuzz created by a covering of simple feather fibers. We know many dinosaurs were covered with that from all those new fossil establishing feathers. And were thus “furry”. The push for more musculature is based on actually applying all that information about live animal soft tissue. And live animals that are actually related to these creatures, to the fossil evidence we have. Rather than rolling with an assumption that these structures were minimal.
This is a pop-sci rundown but the movement for better paleoart, more imaginative reconstructions of Dino’s drawn from animals they were actually related to (chiefly birds) etc has been ongoing for a while now. Darren Naish over at tetrapodzoology has been banging on about it forever (and helped write all yesterdays). The svpow guys, most of your major Dinosaur researchers in the science blog scene really. And they’ve all be publishing research actively.
