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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27837871
I think that many of the people who do depictions of prehistoric creatures lack imagination so they do the bare minimum they possibly could to "imagine" the skeleton as a living creature. Imagination is absolutely required to get a good depiction of them that looks lifelike and not creepy and unrealistic.
Any which way they go with it would be a guess based on limited information. They're most likely going to be wrong, and if they were exactly right, we wouldn't know it.
Honestly they should probably do like 2-3 potential pictures side by side so readers are aware of the uncertainty.
Phat lizards
Jurathicc park.
The artist's impression would more accurately convey the danger of hippos though.
i was gonna say. that's who a hippo is even if that's not what a hippo is
You would love "All Yesterdays" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays)
Scrolled down to make sure someone had mentioned this! Fantastic and professional spotlight on the potential follies and pitfalls of paleontological art. And if you want to do some Lovecraft-level psychic damage to yourself, the same artist from that book has a "speculative evolution" sci fi art book called All Tomorrows in which they envision the multifarious biological forms that humans are forcibly evolved into by a malicious alien race 1 billion years from now. If you've ever read those Scary Stories books by Alvin Schwartz and felt uneasy seeing Stephen Gammell's illustrations, C.M. Kosemen's sketches conjure a similar same vibe.
T-Rex probably had lips
And feathers... and feathered wings on its tiny arms...
Kissable.
T-rex was probably a chonky feathered birb.
Like this?
Yes. How fucking embarrassing would it be for the first artist to set the standard of the t-rex as this intimidating best only for into look like a phat chicken...
the irony of it all is that t-rex specifically seems to have been naked, and i mean naked as in it literally just had a bunch of regular skin like a plucked bird.
Great-great-great-great-great-grandmother chicken.
And most probably females would be bigger than males and hold territories.
I think the same thing whenever I watch my hens go out hunting.
The most terrifying is watching them jump on top of a 5ft fence from the ground. Scale that up to T-Rex size. Fucking nightmare fuel.
Square-cube law got your back
Funnily enough jump height doesn't scale proportionally to body size and the big t-rex would probably still just be able to jump like 5ft
Hippos are pretty metal though.
Skeletor is the archetypical Man, and I will fight you on this.
Nyahahahahahah