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What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like … And Will We Never Know?
Discover, Sept, 2000 by William Speed Weed
Commenting on the series of choices illustrators have to make, from muscle reconstruction to soft tissues and facial features, Witmer suggests that any time an artist makes a decision because it "looks right," he risks falling into the mammal trap. Artists could do a better job by stealing soft tissues from crocodiles and birds to flesh out their dinosaurs, he says, and science-minded artists like Hallett, Skrepnick, and Brougham have already begun to do so. Witmer does not expect the approach to satisfy our expectations. "If you go back and do it right, then it'll look totally weird. But it'll be right," he says. "We've missed a lot of their bizarreness by using these false analogues."
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Witmer continues to dissect modern animals, looking for tiny, signature bone structures that they might share with fossil dinosaurs. He just obtained "a wonderful huge head of a rhino," which required a bigger freezer in his lab. Many paleontologists have maintained that the horns of ceratopsians were rhinolike, and Witmer can now test that hypothesis. He's on the lookout for crocodiles and birds, too, because they hold the best clues to dinosaur soft tissues. The ideal find for him is a set of soft-tissue marks on the bones of both crocodiles and birds. If he can find those same marks on dinosaur fossils, he has strong evidence that the dinosaur had the same soft tissue. He has already used this technique to establish that dinosaurs had an air sac housed in a skull cavity between the eye socket and the nasal opening. For more than a century, paleontologists kicked around hypotheses as to the cavity's function: It was a muscle, it was a gland for salt. Crocodiles and birds have air sacs in that cavity, and those air sacs leave the same characteristic microscopic marks Witmer found on fossil skulls.
This subcutaneous soft-tissue discovery doesn't dramatically change the outside look of dinosaur art. And Witmer's goal isn't to improve dinosaur art. His purpose is to learn more about questions like: What organs did dinosaurs have and what were they used for? But Witmer's work, and the work of a handful of other young paleontologists who are approaching the soft-tissue questions with scientific methods, may ultimately allow artists to flesh out dinosaurs with more hard data. "Anything that increases the chances of a paleo-artist [rendering] something more accurate would be welcomed with open arms," says Hallett. He says he and his colleagues aren't in this business to make guesses. They want to know the truth.
And what about all the paleontologists who say anyone trying to figure out what dinosaurs really looked like is asking the wrong question? Deep down inside, suspects Hallett, they want to know too.
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