• @[email protected]
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    169 days ago

    An interesting book on why many dinosaur depictions are wrong and what they may have looked like.
    The hippos teeth peg it as a mostly vegetation, so depictions would favor that line.

  • @[email protected]
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    1049 days ago

    I want to take it one step further.

    And no, I don’t care if there’s good reason to believe that Tyrannosaurs weren’t fluffy like owls, I still want a decent artist’s depiction of a T. rex with owl-level fluff.

  • @[email protected]
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    849 days ago

    Fun fact, the reason some dinosaurs are depicted with lips is because the asymetrical wear on their teeth doesn’t match with modern equivalent’s that have exposed teeth, meaning they had “labial scale” lips.

    Image owned by Mark P. Witton

  • @[email protected]
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    88 days ago

    Holy shit, this is exactly this book:

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

    There was a great podcast that pointed me to it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-art-redux/transcript/

    I think that’s it. I’ve already done more searching than I intended to get the name of the book. You’re on your own.

    I wanted to be an archeologist when I was a kid because I loved dinos. This book speaks to me.

    • @[email protected]
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      48 days ago

      To whoever likes this sort of fantastical speculative artistry, one of the authors C.M. Koseman also wrote and illustrated All Tomorrow’s, which is a similarly speculative view of humanity from the fictional perspective of a paleontologist in the unfathomably far future, after humanity spread to the stars and experienced an apocalypse that leads us down countless evolutionary paths. Content warning: Body horror, cosmic horror, but presented in an academic way.

      • Ricky Rigatoni
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        28 days ago

        I wish I was one of the snake people. Look at him. He is at peace with his Sock and Juice.

  • snooggums
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    389 days ago

    The reason for the stretched skin look for dinosaurs initially is because of the comparison to lizards, who do frequently have their skin stretched on their bones except in a few places. Unfortunately things like that have momentum, so changing it takes even longer than it took to catch on.

    • @[email protected]
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      209 days ago

      I’m still pissed at Jurassic World cowardly going with the old designs when they could have shown the current knowledge, much like the original movie has.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 days ago

        Eh, in universe it fits the continuity. They’re not dinosaurs, they’re lab created animals that fit an inaccurate public perception of dinosaurs . Corpos keep corping, why mess with a winning formula

      • Björn Tantau
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        69 days ago

        I haven’t watched Jurassic World, but wasn’t that kinda explained with the frog DNA? I heard something to that effect. Meaning that they knew they weren’t like the original animals.

  • Draconic NEO
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    7 days ago

    The term “artist” here is being used kind of loosely. They’re doing the bare minimum you need to turn a skeleton into a living creature. Good artistic representations require a lot more imagination, beyond what we scientifically know. You can get clues by looking at already existing animals and how they relate to their skeletons. Which gives an idea of how much not bone material those creatures might have. No you won’t know exactly how much they did, but that’s not really being represented by skin wrapping either is it. Better to try and go for something believable rather than the bare minimum.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 days ago

      Uh, go and look at most artistic renders of dinosaurs. So much so that people now actively reaist attempts at more accurate depictions. This is very much truth in meme, in fact it’s exactly what they’re sporking.