All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals

How did dinosaurs look? The only way any of us know is from looking at images created by paleoartists, people who specialize in imagining extinct creatures by studying their skeletons. The problem is that skeletons only tell us part of the story, revealing little about layers of body fat, skin type, coloration, and behavior. Now, a new book called All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals — half science, half-science fiction — offers us a radical new way of looking at dinosaurs, based on contemporary scientific speculation. We have an incredible gallery of the paleoart from the book.

Written by paleoartists C.M. Kosemen and John Conway, with an introduction by renowned paleontologist Darren Naish, All Yesterdays is the kind of wonderful, provocative thought experiment that only exists at the nexus of science and art. The book corrects a lot of misconceptions from famous dinosaur art, such as work by Charles Knight, and then heads off into new speculations based on all the "unknown unknowns" of paleontological reconstruction.

And here is a house cat, drawn by Conway channeling the dinosaur paleontologist. No creature could possibly have fur on its face, since dinosaurs don't. So this is clearly how a cat looked.

This is a Majungasaurus crenatissimus, by C.M. Kosemen. One of the points that Koseman and Conway make in the book is that there are certain stereotypical images we get of dinosaurs. We always see them in profile, because that's how skeletons look best. Here we see this fierce predator from the front, and get a good view of its crazy wattles.

These are proceratops, by John Conway. These are a small species related to Triceratops, and we know very little about how they acted. Kosemen and Conway point out that we should look to contemporary animal behavior for clues. They note that goats climb trees, even though their skeletons don't suggest tree climbing animals. Maybe proceratops was the same way?

Here is John Conway's representation of how our dinosaur paleontologist would draw a cow, based on its skeleton. Obviously it must have been a sleek, muscular animal!

This is a Leaellynasaura amicagraphica, by John Conway. This is an experiment with imagining an alternative to what these small dinosaurs might have looked like. The artists note that paleoartists always assume that dinosaurs were sleek, their bodies in the exact shape of their skeletons. But few animals today are shaped exactly like their skeletons. Maybe some dinos were fat with giant, tufted tails.

This is a plesiosaur, by John Conway. Here the artist is imagining this giant ocean predator in an atypical paleoart pose — it's hiding in the muck and algae near the shore, waiting for prey. It's very likely dinosaurs would have had camouflage, and therefore when we imagine them we should consider that their coloration might have matched the colors in their habitats.

This is a picture of the infamous Homo diluvii, by C.M. Kosemen. He and Conway share this as an example of how easy it is to "read into" a skeleton whatever you want. The Homo diluvii was something that 18th century scientists first sketched, as a way to explain the skeleton of a giant salamander they'd discovered (the fossil has since been properly identified). Because they couldn't believe a salamander could have been that big, they drew this humanoid and decided it was a radically new kind of human who had lived on Earth long ago. Kosemen and Conway hint that our current paleoart of dinosaurs might be just as laughable and mistaken as this Homo diluvii.

In the final section of All Yesterdays, we go into the realm of science fiction. An imaginary dinosaur paleontologist discovers ancient fossils from the late Quaternary and tries to sketch what they might have looked like. Here, Kosemen shows the way this dino paleontologist might reconstruct a baboon, by assuming that its body was in the exact shape of its skeleton and that it probably looked kind of like a reptile.

Sept. 15, 2011 -- A stunning array of prehistoric feathers, including dinosaur protofeathers, has been discovered in Late Cretaceous amber from Canada. The 78 to 79-million-year-old amber preserved the feathers in vivid detail, including some of their diverse colors. The collection, published in this week's Science, is among the first to reveal all major evolutionary stages of feather development in non-avian dinosaurs and birds.

Getting closer to dinosaurs in looking at birds, the skeleton of a peacock won't give any indication of it's large fan tailed display, nor the skeleton of a turkey. The skeletons of Parrots, and the many different sorts of Birds of Paradise give no clue to their vibrant plumage either.

In the branches of a gingko, the 4-winged dromaeosaur Microraptor gui pounces on an enantiornithine bird (Sinornis santensis). Briefly losing balance as it clutches the screeching avian, the dinosaur feels around with it's clawed foot to gain a secure purchase before finishing off it's victim with a bite to the head.

A fossil skeleton of Microraptor (one half of which is right now sitting next to my aquarium across from my desk, the counterpart is on the windowsill) was described in 2011 showing the partially arcticulated remains of a tree-dwelling enantiornithine in it's tummy. This not only provided direct evidence of Micro's predatory habits, but was viewed as corroborating the idea of an arboreal lifestyle for this dinosaur.

Artwork originally published in: O’Connor, Zhou & Xu. 2011. Additional specimen of Microraptor provides unique evidence of dinosaurs preying on birds. PNAS

They will find a single knuckle bone and tell us the animals size, diet and how big a herd they ran in.

Originally posted by BrokenAngelWings33
reply to post by GrandStrategy

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What you know is what you have been taught, it does not make it fact.

Ostriches have small wings that are covered with fluffy feathers. The wings are too small to lift the Ostriches heavy bodies off the ground and into the air but are used as rudders when the bird is running to help it change direction.