That is one cute beaver pic on the left. PM more of your beavers.
I like to imagine T. rex arms were small because that’s how they communicated with their octopus rider.
This is some real RFK level science here.
Fossils many times are more than bones and we get actual imprints of their whole tail or other parts of them
No. This was created by someone who has no idea how any of this work. Soft tissues leave marks on bones.
Soft tissues can also become fossils under the right conditions. For an example, here is the fossil used for the B. markmitchelli holotype:
It’s the single most detailed and complete soft tissue fossil ever discovered. It took the technician six years to extract and separate the fossil from the surrounding stone. The technician’s name is Mark Mitchell, and the species was named after him.
The articles on that are a fascinating read, thank you!
Soft tissues leave marks on bones
Could you explain how they leave marks?
Your bones aren’t just swimming around in a sea of muscles. They are attached to the muscles and sinews. So those places where they are attached are formed in specific ways depending on what is attached.
Don’t ruin my dream of fluffy dinosaurs 😭
Smaller dinosaurs might have had fluff, bigger ones probably didn’t, like most big mammals. Bigger body, more heat to dissipate, but less relative surface to do so; the square-cube law can be a bit of a bitch, for big (probably at least somewhat) endothermic critters.
Giraffes have hair, though, and woolly mammoths were a thing, so big fluffy dinosaurs might have been a thing, especially in colder climates.
Also, looking at bird behaviour, I wouldn’t be surprised if even mostly bald dinos had some colorful feathers on their arms, tail, or head for displaying…
It is thought now that dinosaurs had a sort of fluff. Like feathers but not evolved to fly with yet.
Too late, i already imagined a flat-tailed T-rex.
I don’t think dinosaurs were taking x-rays of beaver tails, my dude. Go read a book sometime.
Idiot, why do you think We can see all their bones?
Don’t velociraptors have xray vision though?
That’s why they’re called velociraptors.
Nah, you’re thinking of the much more dangerous “acceleraptors”. Velociraptors were very different from how they are commonly portrayed.
So then distanceraptors are yet to be discoverd?
I thought they were called like this because of their love of bicycles.
Only on weekends
They always use mammals for that kind of comparison. Show me a reptile with that kind of muscle/fat composition.
Dinosaurs were not reptiles. They were warm blooded, and birds descended from them.
The phylogenetic definition of reptile includes birds, so… Penguins, I suppose?
Birds? You mean the last remaining dinosaurs?
We do now know that dinosaurs were the forbearers of birds. Those that told us they were reptiles still continue to push that however. They were warm blooded and it is now thought they had some sort of pre feathers.
I believe the same thing applies to archeology, The Experts claim to have an answer to every question and impute things on the ancient cultures that they have no way of knowing.
They were warm blooded
They were actually in a weird limbo between warm-blooded and cold-blooded, with many features pointing in different directions.
The Experts claim to have an answer to every question
That’s not my experience at all. “The Experts” are extraordinarily cautious to make assertions even when they’re well supported. They talk about “models” and are happy to revise and update their positions when contrary evidence emerges.
Pseudo scientists have answers for everything.
At every period of human history experts have claimed to have all of the answers to every question. They’ve never been right about that but people assume now they are. Dinosaurs are a case in point, as egypt, peru, et al are.
you have no idea about how scientific method works. It’s the furtherst thing from being dogmatic and claiming to know everything. When you look at modern science, you don’t look at a “that was like this” statement, it’s more of “that’s what we discovered so far, it’s weird, so we re-checked it with every method availeble to us, here’s all the data we have and how we checked it”.
I dare you to read at least one actual scientific article before you claim anything about modern science. It’s easy to badmouth it and fentasize about your own reality when all you read are nothing more than rewrites and interpretations of said articles, made by journalists that want to write front-pagers, not to represent the data correctly and substantionally.
This is straight from the Pseudo Scientist playbook, well established Graham Hancock shtick.
So one of the biggest leaps they have made in reconstruction over the last few decades is matching similar bone structure that supports soft tissue. It doesn’t work for all soft tissue, but if the beavers tail bones have bumps or other features that hint at supporting extra soft tissue there is a chance.
All the stuff birds have, like inflatable neck sacks and feathers that move with muscles are examples of things we absolutely wouldn’t get with fossils that are even better than a beaver tail.
Also, in 40 million years, you can match the beaver fossils to the bones of their still living descendants and find similar features.
Well, now I want to see an artist’s rendition of a T. rex doing this:
The Prehistoric Planet documentary series does it with sauropods, it’s pretty sick.
The idea of non-avian dinosaurs with the diverse features and behaviors birds have is very fun to me, and I hope fictitious depictions of birdsaurs becomes as common as classic dinosaurs’s.
I always appreciate an enthusiastic and educational response to situations like this.
I mean… you can see the processes (bony protrusions on the vertebrae) are long and flat and only transverse (sticking out the sides, not up/down) so… it would be pretty obvious it was a flat tail? Sure maybe they might not get that it wasn’t fuzzy without any fossils if it, and maybe they make it slightly less round, but they’re scientists not idiots. Yeah some has come a long way and some older models sucked sure but it ain’t like we are vibe coding their appearance.
Vibe coded lion:
It’s only obvious because you already know what a beaver looks like.
I mean, no?
You can see no vertical protrusions of the vertebrae so there’s going to be A: vertical movement as muscles can best attach to pull up/down. And B: a likely flat structural rail with how wide the horizontal protrusions are. C: nothing sharp or heavily weighted at the end so likely not a huge weaponised tail like a thagomizer. So… you’ve got a probably flat tail, than can slam down on stuff.
Now figuring out WHY it was like that would require being able to find fossils around rivers and being able to tell those rivers had dams or something cuz idk how they would figure out exactly how they use their tails but… yeah you can figure the general shape fine based on vertebrae anatomy which leads to (possible)muscle anatomy. Some bones don’t function the way they look and can throw stuff off. Someone else already mentioned stuff like air sacks in birds and such that would really throw off anatomy based on bone and assumed muscular structure from where bones could have attached muscles.
Pretty much. You can factually tell that a lot of something was going on with all of those delicious muscle hooks on such a small frame, but a flat paddle mightn’t be their first thought. Really depends on who sees it first, but they’d eventually get at least close. Just give it a few years of screaming. Yes, both external and internal.
Sure maybe they might not get that it wasn’t fuzzy without any fossils if it, and maybe they make it slightly less round,
In other words, their depiction would completely different.
If you take out the word ‘completely’ you’ve got it.
One thing I wouldn’t mind AI to do, train a model with standardised data like this, and have it match the reconstruction. After that it can use common and less common reconstructions. After that try to map as much info from a dinosaur fossil to said standardised data structure and generate possible reconstruction for said dinosaur
Oh. I like this idea. This is the kind of thing AI would be good for.
All dinosaurs had beaver tails, got it!
Sure but also there are some fossils that DO have skin, and some even have preserved organs. And some have feathers, which is a pretty good indicator that there wasn’t some large feature we’re missing.
No doubt we are wrong on lots of counts, but I think we have good evidence for a lot of it as well.
Do beavers enjoy… Uppies??
