Other things like preserved soft-tissue impressions really help to literally ‘flesh out’ dinosaurs in our minds. All vertebrate animals generally follow the same skeletal blueprint with just variations on the ancestral theme, so knowing the anatomy of living animals provides hints at what extinct ones looked like. The science of comparative anatomy is one of the foundations of paleontology, and is how the earliest paleontologists were able to figure out the basics of what extinct animals looked like. But that’s not to say that’s all we have, and paleontologists can infer a lot from studying fossil skeletons and comparing them to modern day animals. We know a surprising amount about what dinosaurs looked like when they were alive considering we mostly just have their bones. It might seem sad that some dinosaurs lived and died with nothing to remember them by, but is recognition by humans really the only honor that a species gets in the course of time? Well, that’s a topic for another time, so let’s go back to the life appearance of dinosaurs. Fossilizing is all about dying in the right place at the right time, and entire species probably came and went without leaving any trace of a geological record. Heck, we probably won’t even discover every dinosaur that ever lived. Let’s face it, we might not ever fully and completely know what every species of non-avian dinosaur looked like when it was alive.
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