A swan is just a cranky goose with a better stylist.
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There’s an XKCD for that!
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Badly plucked?
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I’m seeing an iconic endangered fluffy polar T-rex sitting on an Arctic ice floe.
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Imagine a T-Rex mating display.
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Isn’t it just? It’s like a seven-ton murder sparrow! 
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So deadly!
Caught between the urge to rub its belly and the necessity to flee for my life.
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“Pluck me like one of your French birds” ?
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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.
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Dinosaur art mostly bullshit
Well, I guess that statement pretty much paints a very wide, YouTube-worthy, click-baitfish, brush stroke through the whole subject of dinosaur art, and that energized by C.M. Kosemen who has created a dubious horse to ride for bucks and glory.
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PROTIP: don’t rely on frog DNA to fill in the gaps.
Hey wait a moment-- how much of our newfound knowledge base is going to be based on the genetic inferences we have to use to “pull a Jurassic Park”?
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Vermeer-aptor?
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Koseman is from what I can tell a pretty well regarded paleoartist who’s been publishing a whole host of rad shit. Often in concert with some very exciting researchers. And is part of a group of very interesting paleoartists who are pushing for better, more up to date understandings of animal anatomy and the state of paleontology in popular depictions of exinct life. So whether Atlas Obscure or Rob chose a clickbait title he’s been riding that horse to a respectable working career for a while.
This subject is not new. All Yesterdays was published 5 years ago.
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It’s conceivable, for example, that future paleoartists will speculate that turtles once left their shells, or that frogs, with their weird legs, used to run around upright.
I could have sworn that Churchy La Femme left his shell on occasion.
Don’t skeletons of turtles help show that the shell is an integral part of the skeleton?
I think it’s somewhat naive to think the far future will be as clueless about the past as we are now. It is my expectation and hope that digital recordings will manage to survive. Even with changes in technology I would hope a large number keep getting converted to a newer system so a lot of basic knowledge will never be lost.
I don’t expect that everyone’s tweets from this year will be able to be found and read 2000 years from now, but I would expect large swaths of knowledge, such as some pictures of current raccoons, to remain intact.
I’m sure a few catastrophes could prove me wrong, but that’s my hope.
ETA: Just remembered, there’s an XKCD for that
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data.png
How’s your Linear B? Or cuneiform?
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I’ll just leave one of my wife’s paintings here: Lesser Bowertyrant (Gorgosaurus libratus) | cubelight gfx
??? He’s a pretty accomplished artist who has done some pretty amazing work. (Who also did the Snaiad stuff; indeed, this was my introduction to his art.)
They can, but they shouldn’t have scales—at least nothing like reptile scales. In spite of unfortunate (archaic) nomenclature that used to call protomammals “mammal-like reptiles” (they were neither), they have nonetheless far more in common with modern mammals than they have with reptiles.
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