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What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like … And Will We Never Know?
Discover, Sept, 2000 by William Speed Weed
PEOPLE WHO WERE MORE THAN 20 YEARS OLD WHEN JURASSIC PARK CAME OUT IN 1993 will remember that the zippy, jeep-chasing Tyrannosaurus rex wasn't the same creature they'd grown up with. He didn't lumber or drag his tail on the ground, as T. rexes did in earlier movies. What we were used to came out of the scientific assumption--which held sway for the better half of this century--that dinosaurs were cold-blooded. There was no proof of cold-bloodedness, but it was the most popular working hypothesis for three generations of paleontologists. That hypothesis was writ large in art. T. rex dragged his tail because he was sluggish. Brontosaurus (now called Apatosaurus) was too massive a creature for a cold-blooded circulation to support on land, so artists depicted him wading through swamps, near crocodilian ceratopsians basking on the shores. In the late 1960s, a scientist named Bob Bakker began to challenge cold-bloodedness. He reinterpreted fossils to look more like warm-blooded bones. Over a decade or two, most paleontologists came to a vague consensus--still considered controversial because no one can prove it--that dinosaurs regulated their own body temperatures. All of a sudden, these huge creatures had to keep warm. So instead of lolling about like lizards in artwork, they careen about like cheetahs. Doug Henderson of Earth History Illustrations in Whitehall, Montana, notes that a scientific hypothesis will not simply enter the artwork as a possibility--as the best scientific guess that it really is. Rather, it takes off like a known truth and is expressed to the extreme. We've gone from the earlier torpor of a swampish lost world to today's art, in which "The level of activity has gotten to where the dinosaurs have got bees up their butts!" says Henderson. These days, the hotly debated notion that birds are descended from dinosaurs is the latest notion to run amok in art, and not just with Velociraptor and other creatures that had birdlike skeletons. Even a baby T. rex was recently sighted wearing feathers.
--W.S.W.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Discover
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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