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What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like … And Will We Never Know?
Discover, Sept, 2000 by William Speed Weed
The process of laying muscles over the skeletal frame was vital to the success of Disney's Dinosaur movie. Hallett put together some of the initial working illustrations of these imaginary dinosaurs. He sketched detailed skeletons of iguanodons, the herding, four-legged, long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs that serve as the main characters in the movie. Over each skeleton, he drew a full set of muscles adapted from crocodile anatomy and complete with Latin names. Then, at the behest of Disney, Hallett modified the overall look of the creatures to be reminiscent, in a Mesozoic way, of horses. The muscle drawings became the basic set of instructions the animators used to move the dinosaurs around in a believable way.
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Applying muscles to a skeleton can be error prone. While the upper arm bone and elbow of a human strongly suggest biceps, the abdominal cavity of a skeleton provides no information--in humans or dinosaurs. "There's a lot of extrapolations involved," says Hallett, but if you are a careful student of comparative anatomy, "you can be reasonably assured of the major groups." If the artists render the muscles the way dinosaurs actually wore them, then their accuracy approaches that of, say, the musculature page in a human anatomy book: not a bad indication of what we look like on the outside, but still missing breasts, ears, noses, pot bellies, and all the other soft-tissue structures that define a creature's shape but make no large marks on the bone.
Brougham respects these limitations. A thoughtful 30-year-old with dexterous artist hands that he doesn't use when he's talking, Brougham mentions elephant trunks and ears, tapir snouts, and toucans as examples of creatures whose appearance one could never guess from their skeletons alone. "A toucan is preposterous," he says. Its head seems too big to hold up and "it's too extreme to be true." Still, Brougham believes that reminders of nature's whimsy do not give him license to speculate as many illustrators have done, putting, for example, proboscises or caruncles on a variety of dinosaur body parts. If Brougham doesn't have good information on soft tissues, he won't add any--no hump on the protoceratops's back, nor droopy wattles under its chin, nor a peacocky frill about its crest, even though all are as likely as the trunk on an elephant.
Brougham covered his protoceratops model with an ochre skin embossed with a scaly pattern suggested by fossilized skin impressions. What dinosaur skins actually looked like is one of the least-known elements of reconstruction. Brougham had to guess how the scales might have differed over the various parts of the body. He chose ochre as a neutral tone that might have blended well with the arid sands of the area, subtly camouflaging the creature from the eyes of a velociraptor. Most dinosaur colorations in recent years--and every year brings a wider range of patterns and pigments--are based on guesses about the landscape the creature lived in and its need for camouflage. By necessity, this reasoning makes unscientific assumptions about the ability of dinosaur eyes to distinguish colors and shapes. Eyes are a soft tissue that we will likely never have direct evidence for, paleontologists say. We do not know what dinosaurs saw, or if they saw in color, so we cannot know how they evolved to hide from one another.
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