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Question of the Day: Have you ever been to an airshow?
Question on reconstructing fossils
- Thread starter smb3
- Start date
porchrat
Honorary Master
Thought this article might interest you as it is related:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/12/us-science-trex-idUSTRE79B76D20111012
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/12/us-science-trex-idUSTRE79B76D20111012
(Occasionally) Intelligent Guesswork.
Lol .. plus my grammar leaves much to be desired (noticed my typo just now
) ... reason i ask is cause while it seems to be pretty straightforward to add flesh onto a fossil ... but what about reconstructing stuff that had fat or blubbery things? ... at the moment i presume that a herbivore is more likely to have blubber than a carnivore thats why the dinosaur predators had little to no fat?As porchrat mentioned it probably has something to do with 3d scanning and modeling (amazing how you come up with the cool links by the way
) and that they base it of existing animals "as guides" ... but nonetheless a really cool field
porchrat
Honorary Master
I had by chance just happened to read that article yesterday and then I saw this thread and thought if you're asking that sort of question (which I still don't know the answer to but am going to try my darndest to find out) you would surely find that article as interesting as I did so I posted it.As porchrat mentioned it probably has something to do with 3d scanning and modeling (amazing how you come up with the cool links by the way
What good is some interesting piece of knowledge if you can't share it with others.
Lol .. plus my grammar leaves much to be desired (noticed my typo just now
As porchrat mentioned it probably has something to do with 3d scanning and modeling (amazing how you come up with the cool links by the way
My reply wasn't aimed at your OP, but at the field as a whole. Bill Bryson in his "A short history of (almost) everything" briefly discuss the topic, and shows how little we really know of the field. He took as an example a case where the scientists of the day mistook a horn for a tooth (might have been other way round).
A simple difficulty in the field is how to decide which bones matches which animal. If two animals died close together (same vicinity, a few hundred years apart), and both have one bone fossilized, it is easy to assume that both bones are from the same animal (unless you're lucky and both are teeth
). So your fossil record will show two bones, one being a small carnivorous tooth from a jackal, and another the thigh bone of a giraffe. From the tooth logic dictates that it must have been a carnivore, probably a scavenger, with fairly small teeth. The thigh bone tells you that the animal itself was large and tall. So you end up with a tall, heavy animal with a small head and small teeth, running around trying to find carrion. Add to that a third bone (let's make this one the same jackal's foreleg) and you have a large animal, small teethed, with two long legs and two short legs. Mmm, this one walks on two legs! Bingo, he probably used his arms and length to steal carrion from leopards. Yeah, my example is a bit silly, but it underscores the inaccuracy of the field. Those models are based on existing evidence, and on logic conclusions based on that evidence. The evidence is thousands of years old, however, and most often you only have very few bones of the same animal type.
