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What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like … And Will We Never Know?
Discover, Sept, 2000 by William Speed Weed
Our attraction to dinosaurs doesn't spring from a scientific source, so the paleontological inability to say what they really looked like has no real power to drive dinosaur icons from our world. In fact, rather than wholly dismiss dinosaur art, many scientists use its popularity to their advantage. After all, it does win money for museums and field research. Some of the more media-savvy, like Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, will wait to publicize a dinosaur discovery until they have a commissioned painting of the creature to show. By working with artists, scientists can at least inform them about what is known. "It's great when [artists] try to be scientifically accurate" says Scott Sampson, an officer of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Thanks in part to efforts by his group to encourage relationships between professional dinosaur artists and scientists, most dinosaur images produced today, whether for movies or magazines or museums, are grounded in hard data, even though hard data can only be a starting point.
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Jason Brougham, a senior preparator at the American Museum of Natural History, sculpted the Fighting Dinosaurs' protoceratops in the new diorama. To start with the science, Brougham studied protoceratops bones under the direction of paleontologist Norell. Brougham had a lot to go on because some 120 protoceratops skeletons have been found. For some dinosaur species, the fossil record contains only one skeleton, which is, more often than not, incomplete. Many dinosaur artists have faced the challenge of rendering a creature on the basis of half a skeleton. Mark Hallett, who has drawn and painted dinosaurs for museums, scientific publications, National Geographic, and movie studios, recently rendered a newly discovered dinosaur, Seismosaurus, on the basis of only 40 percent of its skeleton: "A few neck vertebrae, a complete pelvis, about a third of the tail, and no skull," he says. To help get a better idea of what the creature looked like, Hallett studied its closest known relatives and made a plausible guess.
Even with complete skeletons, there is lots of room for interpretation on how the bones go together. One major controversy with ceratopsians (the family of Triceratops and Protoceratops) is whether they stood on straight legs like rhinos or crouched crook-legged like crocodiles. In most dinosaur art before the 1980s, ceratopsians dragged their bellies under legs crooked out to the sides. Since then, it has been more popular to render them straight up, as on rhinos. That is the way Brougham sculpted his protoceratops. But Peter Dodson, a ceratopsian expert at the University of Pennsylvania, argues the proper pose is crook-legged, not necessarily in the "extreme push-ups" pose of modern crocodiles, but certainly not in the straight pillar fashion of modern rhinos either. According to Dodson's reading of bones, all straight-legged ceratopsian reconstructions suffer, from painful shoulder dislocations.
With a working model of the skeleton, artists like Brougham must first think about muscles. The bones help in this regard. Muscle attachment points are sometimes obvious as scars on fossils, and the relationship between muscles and bone is fairly consistent for most vertebrates.
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