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What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like … And Will We Never Know?
Discover, Sept, 2000 by William Speed Weed
We also can't know what the eyes themselves looked like, although they are major contributors to the appearance of a dinosaur face presented to the public. The slit pupils of reptiles and the round pupils of birds are good guesses, but artists have tended to go with slits only when they want the dinosaur to look mean. Broughams protoceratops has nondescript beads with round pupils.
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The rest of the face of Brougham's protoceratops is the same shape as the fossil skull. There are no extra flourishes, folds, or fringes except around the mouth, where he pulled the flesh over the sides of the jaw to make cowlike cheeks. Cheeks "look right," he says, but there's no conclusive evidence for them. The Disney dinosaurs also have cheeks, as well as fringes that look like eyebrows and lips for speaking English. Brougham put the nostrils on his protoceratops far forward, near its beak, following the example of most living creatures. Think of alligators, lizards, dogs, and donkeys: The nostrils go as close to the mouth as the nasal cavity will allow. Vertebrates like to lead with their noses. Disney's dinosaurs follow a different example, quite popular in dinosaur art. Their nostrils are farther back on the snout, halfway between the eyes and the mouth.
The velociraptor that stalks the protoceratops in the diorama is also based on a series of educated guesses about skeletal and soft-tissue structure, with one added consideration: This velociraptor has feathers. A multicolored frill graces its pate, and the rest of its body is covered in a fluffy sheath of unusual feathers that dinosaur artists have come to call dinofuzz--definitely not fur, but not quite feathers either. The feathers were Norell's idea. They're not required by direct fossil evidence, but there is a debatable set of quill-like impressions around some fossil finds, To Norell, it's important to read these as feathers all over the body because the major thrust of his work as a scientist is to show that dinosaurs are direct ancestors of modern birds. The small fossils that line the walls of the Fighting Dinosaurs exhibit have helped him further establish an evolutionary lineage from Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor to the emu, the tit, and the vulture. But he cannot prove these relationships. Very little in paleontology is subject to direct proof because we cannot resurrect these creatures. Nevertheless, it is a legitimate working hypothesis, and ensconcing a hypothesis in artistic reconstruction is common practice in scientist-artist collaborations.
So. The bones are evidence that's interpretable. The muscles are guided guesswork. Everything else--soft tissues, skin, folds, frills, cheeks, lips, eyes, nostrils, pattern, color, covering-is artistic license, or, in the case of Norell's feathers, scientific license. How far off could the dinosaur renderings be?
The most conservative answer, which many scientists give, is that we just don't know. Paleontology is the study of fossils; fossils are limited in the information they provide, so we will always run the risk of drawing a titanic hamster instead of an elephant, and we'll never know if we're doing it. Artists give a curiously different answer. In a sense, they know better than the scientists how far off they might be because they are the ones who must constantly do the guesswork. Many artists agree we'll never know whether a particular drawing accurately represents a creature that's been dead for 80 million years, but they also say it is possible to get a sense of how far off dinosaur art could be by exposing the process of layered guesswork. Hallett puts it this way: If he took a set of scientific evidence about a dinosaur and allowed himself to explore all the possible muscle placements, soft-tissue structures, facial variations and skin tones and patterns and folds and frills, he says he could draw a series of solutions and "come up with very different-looking dinosaurs." To scientists, of course, they'd all be the same, based on the same evidence. But to museum goers, they'd be different creatures. The Society for Vertebrate Paleontology's Scott Sampson thinks such a varied lineup would be a great way for the science to peer through the art, because the only constant across the range of pictures would be hard facts: "Don't just illustrate [a few options] with a given set of evidence, but do the whole range. Vary everything and get 17 different things. It underscores our ignorance about these animals."
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