BRINGING DINOSAURS TO LIFE
DESPITE HAVING roamed the planet millions of years ago, dinosaurs aren’t as inscrutable today as they once were. Over the past decades, in addition to studying what dinos acted like, including their habits and diets, researchers have specialized in reconstructing and depicting what they looked like — all the way down to specific details like texture and color.
But how do scientists go about pinpointing these details for creatures that died 65 million years ago? It turns out, we know more about dinosaur looks than you might think.
“We actually know way more than paleontologists tend to convey and also way more than the average person gets,” says Darren Naish, a vertebrate paleontologist specializing in reevaluating
dinosaurs. “We’re doing really well, actually, in terms of what we know.”
For scientists, reconstructing a dino’s appearance is an extremely nuanced process. When paleontologists and paleoartists work to reconstruct a dinosaur, they usually proceed from the inside out. In other words, they start at the skeleton and then build to details on the surface.
1 Start With the Dinosaur’s Skeleton
This first step helps scientists determine a dinosaur’s core form by reconstructing its skeleton through fossils like bones, shells and teeth — along with anything else tough enough to survive fossilization.
From the skeleton, experts can then deduce the posture and stance of the creature, allowing them to crossreference it with fossils of its footprints. These details then inform things like how far apart its feet were placed when walking, for instance. After that, researchers can create computer models to simulate the entire animal.
2 Flesh Out the Body, Shape and Bulk
Certain extinct dinosaurs have left a few bits of preserved muscle tissue behind, says Mark Witton, a paleontologist and paleoartist at the University of Portsmouth. But perhaps more importantly, scholars can use fossilized bones with scars of where muscles were attached to fill in the gaps.
Plus, since muscle layout is actually quite consistent across the animal kingdom — from humans to, say, crocodiles — experts can look at living animals and get a pretty good idea of what the muscle layout of an extinct vertebrate might be,
says Witton. Unfortunately, it’s still unclear how bulky or atrophied these muscles may have been.
“That’s not always clear from fossils, and we know this was very variable among living animals,” adds Witton.
3 Layer on the Skin and Texture
Dinosaur skin preserves more often than you might think, but also not as often as we’d like, says Witton.
Experts have made maps of different skin types throughout dinosaur evolution to make predictions for species without preserved skin available. They can also use depressions, creases and impressions of blood vessels from the surface of bones to help them deduce the type of skin that appeared on top. Skin and bone interact when they’re very close, particularly when the skin is tough or scaly, says Witton.
The sheer size of many dinosaurs makes it difficult to extrapolate from one part of their anatomy to their body as a whole, though. In other words, knowing what their skin was like on, say, a sauropod’s leg, may not apply to everywhere else on such a gargantuan animal.
4 Add the Color and Covering
In 1996, paleontologists in China discovered some of the first fossilized, feathered dinosaurs; since then, nearly 50 more species have been discovered. These first findings cemented that some dinosaurs were indeed feathered, which allowed experts to learn more about their colors in general.
What’s more, examining these feathered remains under the microscope reveals they’re clad in well-preserved microscopic organisms. At first, they were mistakenly described as bacteria. But in the early 2000s, scholars proposed an alternative explanation, revealing that the elongated, sausagelike molecules were actually melanosomes — cells containing melanin that give color to hair in mammal and feathers in bird. In 2010, Benton’s lab published a study describing how to ascribe color to different dinosaurs by looking at the shapes of different melanosomes.
“The fact [that] it’s the same relationship with color and shape in both birds and mammals gave us the confidence that we could apply it to almost any fossil group,” says Benton, adding that these pigment cells have different arrangements, densities and orientations, providing information about a dinosaur’s patterns, stripes and color arrangements.
5 Draw the Dinosaur’s Face
Possibly the most controversial part of reconstructing a dinosaur’s appearance is determining what, exactly, their faces looked like. Some researchers say that the detailed, external bone surface texture on the face of, say, the T. rex is just like that of a crocodilian. Meanwhile, other scientists looking at the same data believe it’s consistent with animals that have extensive soft tissues on the face and a lot of skin built up around the jaw edges.
“Within a few years, if we do the right studies, we should be able to come up with standardized reconstructions for things like the face of T. rex or the face of a triceratops; we’ve already done this for some horned dinosaurs,” says Witton, whose lab published the 2023 paper in Science detailing that Tyrannosauruses likely had lips that concealed their teeth — upending the fearsome way they’re often depicted in the media.