Bandung – Dinosaurs are often depicted as terrifying and large wild animals. However, if we look at the research results, maybe the appearance of dinosaurs is not as scary as we imagine.
With only a few bone fragments as a guide, early paleontologists made a lot of ridiculous guesses about what dinosaurs looked like.
The depiction of dinosaurs has changed a lot since their first discovery, from silly creatures resembling scaly rhinoceroses to fearsome, furry beasts.
Celebrating 200 years since the discovery of the first dinosaur, let’s look back in time to see how our view of dinosaurs has changed.
Early Dinosaur Appearances
The story of dinosaurs, or at least their appearance, begins on February 20, 1824. At a meeting of the Geological Society, a scientist named William Buckland gave a lecture about fossils found at Stonesfield, Oxfordshire.
His theory was that these were the bones of a now extinct species of giant lizard, which he named megalosaurus, which means big lizard.
We now know that megalosaurs were one of the largest carnivores of the middle Jurassic Era and lived about 168 million years ago.
In his lecture, he described a very large animal fossil with a length exceeding 12 m and the size of an elephant. However, modern experts believe that megalosaurs were about six meters long and walked on two legs, not four as Buckland believed.
dinosaur Photo: via Daily Mail
In the 1863 illustration of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus below, you can see how these animals were believed to be giant lizards that walked on four legs.
However, considering this was almost 20 years before the term dinosaur was coined, he must have gotten some details wrong. In early artistic depictions of dinosaurs, creatures like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon looked more like large, scaly dogs with long, hanging tails.
In 1854, sculptor and paleo artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins unveiled 30 statues of dinosaurs and ancient mammals in the Crystal Palace gardens.
Created under the instruction of paleontologist Richard Owen, who coined the term dinosaur, it is the first full-scale depiction of a dinosaur.
But to modern people, these old statues may seem funny. Iguanodon literally looked like a giant iguana, while Megalosaurus looked more like a giant lizard.
dinosaur Photo: via Daily Mail
Dr Susannah Maidment, senior researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, explained that this strange model was based on the best evidence available at the time.
“When Buckland found these bones, he had a few hip bones, a few limb bones and a jaw, but that’s all they had,” he said as quoted by the Daily Mail.
“When Gideon Mantel first discovered the first iguanodon, all it had were two teeth,” he added.
To try to guess what these creatures might be like, Mantel and artists like Hawkins look to living animals for inspiration.
Although more and more fossils are being discovered, the lack of complete skeletons has led to some ridiculous misinterpretations. In the 1869 illustration below, the head of the Elasmosaurus is actually where its tail would be, additionally the artist gave the Dryptosaurus too many fingers.
Today, paleontologists have fully articulated complete skeletons to work with so we have a pretty good idea of what a dinosaur’s basic body shape looked like.
However, soft tissues like muscle and fat don’t survive in the fossil record, meaning paleo artists are usually free to make dinosaurs as skinny or big as they want.
This causes the megalosaur to appear very large, while in some depictions, the T-rex appears to have had a fairly extreme diet.
But for other characteristics, they still need to look at living descendants of dinosaurs such as birds and crocodiles, and look at existing phylogenetic groups.
“Essentially we can find muscles in crocodiles, then find the same muscles in birds,” Professor Maidment said.
“If birds and crocodiles both have this muscle then it probably means they inherited it from their common ancestor and therefore dinosaurs had it too,” he added.
While this helps for some features, paleontologists still know nothing about features like lips and cheeks.
“Dominion and Walking with Dinosaurs, explains that by examining the fossil record, we now know more about what dinosaurs looked like,” said Professor Steven Brusatte, a paleontologist from the University of Edinburgh who consulted on the film Jurassic World.
Changes in Perception
However, modern paleontologists don’t necessarily get the right answer. “When the first dinosaurs were named and described 200 years ago, they were imagined as reptiles that grew large and stood upright like mammals,” said Professor Brusatte.
“Over the years, that perception changed, and dinosaurs became stereotyped as giant, slow-moving, stupid, and scaly reptiles, like overgrown crocodiles or lizards. We now know that dinosaurs were much more athletic, energetic, and dynamic than the perception before,” he said.
One of the biggest mistakes that people often make is that dinosaurs had feathers. The first Jurassic Park film showed dinosaurs colored green or brown and covered in scales. But experts now say that’s somewhat accurate.
“We know that many dinosaurs had feathers. This is not a guess, or a hallucination of artists and mad scientists,” Professor Brussatte said.
“We have thousands of dinosaur fossils covered in feathers, most of which were buried by several catastrophic volcanic eruptions in China that locked away many of the details of their bones and feathers,” he continued.
feathered dinosaur Photo: via Daily Mail
Not all dinosaurs had feathers but experts now believe that many carnivorous dinosaurs had thick, colorful feathers.
When it comes to color, scientists say we may also be getting it wrong. For scaly dinosaurs, it is difficult to know exactly what color they were, even though parts of their skin have been fossilized.
But we can actually get a pretty good idea of the color of feathered dinosaurs.
“If you take a scanning electron microscope and look at the feathers of a living bird, you will find that it has cells called melanosomes and these cells store the pigment melanin,” Dr Maitment said.
In living birds, the shape of these cells actually codes for feather color, whether red and brown or black and gray. And if these cells are stacked on top of each other, this indicates that the feathers will be colorful and shining, like in starlings.
While it’s funny how far away our ideas about dinosaurs are in the past, learning what they actually looked like is extremely important to paleontology.
“This debate is still ongoing among experts. Did dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus have lips or not? This is important in terms of our understanding of how they ate,” said Dr Emma Nicholls, collections manager at the University of Oxford’s Natural History Museum.
Another debate concerns the usefulness of certain structures, such as the Spinosaurus sail. Does it function for thermoregulation, sexual performance, or has something to do with swimming, and something else.
This article was published on detikInet with the title The Form of Dinosaurs According to Scientists in the 1800s
(rns/yum)
2024-02-29 22:00:21
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