Aided by new discoveries and refined investigation methods, science is changing the way we see dinosaurs. A little colour doesn’t hurt either, writes Evrim Yazgin. This article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine, March 2023.
Close your eyes and imagine a dinosaur. I don’t have any clairvoyant powers, but I’ve a pretty good idea of what most of you have conjured.
It’s a Tyrannosaurus rex – right? It’s the most famous dinosaur, and the easiest for most of us to picture. You’re probably also seeing it as a big grey-brown monster akin to the ‘rex’ represented in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park. Am I right?
There it is: seven tonnes of carnivore astride a grassy field against the backdrop of a lush, tropical forest under bright blue skies. There are likely herds of lumbering long-necked sauropods in the background of your mind’s dino scene and a brown Triceratops or two as well. In fact, your imaginary T. rex is probably bounding after the horned Triceratops with an epic battle to the death ensuing as the picture plays out in your head.
This is the popular view of dinosaurs, informed by all sorts of media over the years. It’s also, probably, mostly wrong.
Science is showing that much of what we’ve believed in the past about dinosaurs – from where they lived to what they looked like and how they behaved – isn’t accurate. And, in fact, a lot of what is still put out for popular consumption lags far behind our scientific knowledge.
Top billing: dinos on screen
So let’s start by playing fair: media representations of dinosaurs have come a long way.
T. rex was discovered in 1902 in Hell Creek, Montana, US, by the American Museum of Natural History’s famous fossil hunter Barnum Brown. Brown – aka ‘Mr Bones’ – is said to have been named after beyond-legend circus showman P.T. Barnum (1810–91).
Early reconstructions of the “lizard king” showed an erect, kangaroo-like animal. T. rex’s first media appearance was the 1918 film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. Famed for its pioneering special effects work by Willis O’Brien, whose SFX later graced The Lost World, in 1925, Slumber Mountain featured a stop-motion T. rex vs Triceratops matchup three-quarters of a century before Spielberg took on the idea. While nowhere near as “realistic” as Spielberg’s rex, there’s something terrifyingly other-worldly about the 1918 version.
The inaccurate upright T. rex lived on in popular media well into the 1970s and ’80s, despite scientific research having shown for decades a much more anatomically correct orientation of the bone joints.
“People have been making them grey and brown … The preponderance of evidence suggests they would be vividly coloured because birds are dinosaurs”
While better in this respect, Jurassic Park’s “Roberta” (the official name of the film’s main villain) still lacks for scientific accuracy. It’s too big; its skull is the wrong shape. And its behaviour, colouration and lack of feathers are all contentious issues.
Dino-lovers of my generation grew up with the BBC’s 1999 series Walking With Dinosaurs. I was four years old when I watched the documentary series, and it changed my life. It was a work of art and a scientific marvel and it sparked the imaginations of an entire cohort of nerdy kids. For the first time, dinosaurs were brought to life according to relatively up-to-date information.
But nearly a quarter of a century on, even this has become outdated. Does it matter? Well, yes.
The media’s representation of dinosaurs has a huge impact into how they are perceived by the rest of us. Depicting scientifically accurate (or, as scientifically accurate as possible) dinosaurs can dispel myths and paint a much more interesting picture of these extinct creatures.
Last year the BBC released a new dinosaur documentary series, Prehistoric Planet. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, the series picks up where Walking With Dinosaurs left off: it provides a visually stunning, scientifically backed view of dinosaurs to a new generation. The first episode begins with a T. rex mother and her feathered hatchlings – swimming of all things!
It’s this kind of imaginative thinking about dinosaur behaviour that palaeontologists believe should be more commonplace in our representations of the extinct animals.
Local finds, global learning
On an unseasonably warm, humid September day, I’m in the Melbourne Museum to learn how palaeontological know-how turns a fossil into an understanding of how long-dead organisms lived and died.
Showing me around the museum’s five-million-item fossil collection are Tim Ziegler, Collection Manager of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Museums Victoria, and Hazel Richards, a leading curator behind the museum’s latest prize possession – the near-complete fossil skeleton of the Triceratops affectionately dubbed ‘Horridus’.
A seven-metre-long Triceratops horridus, Horridus lived about 67 million years ago – near the end of the era of the dinosaurs. The animal’s one-tonne fossilised remains were found in 2014 in Montana and later brought to Melbourne; they represent the most complete real dinosaur fossil in any Australasian museum. In addition to the 266 bones that make up the main display (including the 261 kilogram skull), which opened in March 2022, curators sought to give a picture of the animal’s habitat. Using a game engine, the team produced scenes from a forest clearing, an undergrowth, and a riverbank to illustrate the triceratops’ environment. The scenes include turtles, crocodiles, other dinosaurs, and even early mammals.
Bare bones
Just how much information can you derive from a skeleton, anyway? Recent science has stretched into new fields exploring dermatology, anatomy, dentistry and spectography to try to form a clearer picture of what covered and decorated animals from the deep past. Palaeoartist C. M. Kosemen believes that many illustrations and popular depictions suffer from the “shrink wrap” effect: applying muscle but no fat or soft tissue, then laying the skin over the top.
“I was first prompted to draw this series when I saw x-rays of a crocodile,” Kosemen told the Daily Mail.
“Even this dinosaur relative had far more fat, muscles and soft tissues on its body than most of our dinosaur depictions; which were as skinny as medieval paintings of plague victims.”
Other common errors include the over accentuation of teeth and underestimation of soft tissue, for example an elephant’s ears.
Entering the museum’s protective cool, dry and dark fossil store, Ziegler points to a fossil “assemblage” discovered in Victoria, which includes the fossil remains of many different species within the same rock. He emphasises that such complexes give us a picture of a local ecosystem.
One of the preserved animals is the “southern hunter” Australovenator. The largest theropod dinosaur in Australia known from decent remains, Australovenator would have grown to around 5–6m in length. Ziegler hands me a 3D-printed copy of the ancient carnivore’s claw: my very own Jurassic Park moment.
“There’s no reason T. rex couldn’t have been feathered and pink and danced and sang. Everybody just laughs at that. But it’s just as accurate.”
Ziegler and Richards explain that, more and more, palaeontology relies on the global fossil record.
“Our understanding of the appearance and behaviour of dinosaurs is shaped by the growing fossil collections in museums worldwide,” Richards says. “While some dinosaurs are known from beautifully complete skeletons – like [Horridus] – most individual species are represented only by a few fragmentary fossils. But, because species that are closely related to one usually share many skeletal features, palaeontologists can generalise across related dinosaurs to infer the missing anatomy – at least until more fossils are found to fill in those gaps.”
The pterosaur Barbaridactylus is an example of ancient animals known from scant physical evidence – one reason Horner urges creativity when re-creating dinosaurs. Credit: Apple TV/Prehistoric Planet.
Palaeontology, like any science, benefits from technology advances. Ziegler points out that new, non-invasive techniques such as micro-CT scanning and even chemical preparations are less likely to damage the fossils than traditional methods. These methods necessarily integrate palaeontology with other science disciplines such as physics and chemistry.
One example I’m shown is an exquisitely well-preserved fossilised fish skull. The delicate bone looks like it could have belonged to an animal that died a few years ago: even its jaw hinges are preserved. But this fish lived more than 300 million years in the past.
“By looking at how living animals behave and use their skeletons, sometimes even tiny pieces of anatomy can tell us a great deal about how extinct animals like dinosaurs probably lived,” Richards says.
In a smaller room housing fossil holotypes – the original specimens upon which a new species is described – we pause at the Victorian dinosaur Leaellynasaura. Ziegler explains that the 40 centimetre-tall herbivore, discovered in the late 1980s, changed the way that dinosaurs were perceived. It lived over 100 million years ago, when Victoria lay south of the polar circle. It was small, agile, and hardy – a far cry from the lumbering, monstrous dinosaurs that filled popular representations of old.
“The biggest transformation in our modern understanding of dinosaurs was arguably a series of discoveries in the 1960s–1970s that came to be known as the ‘dinosaur renaissance’,” says Richards. “These drastically changed how scientists thought about dinosaurs – from being slow, dopey creatures to dynamic, warm-blooded animals with complex social lives. Discovery and recognition of further important fossils led to our understanding that members of the theropod dinosaur group [the group that includes T. rex] evolved into modern birds.”
But biases still hamper our ability to imagine what these magnificent beasts were like. How can scientists help overcome these enduring misconceptions? Richards notes the important role that even scientifically inaccurate representations can have.
“I think all palaeontologists agree that Jurassic Park is responsible for really bringing dinosaurs into the public consciousness,” she says. “It certainly sparked renewed interest in studying dinosaurs, and most palaeos today will speak of it fondly as an influence on their studies and their career.
“Even 30 years and many sequels later, if the average person thinks of a T. rex you can bet it’s the Jurassic Park rex they are imagining.”
But what about documentaries? Richards says it’s all about historical context.
“Any time you attempt to depict science on screen, you are taking a snapshot of the understanding at that specific point in time – but science is a process and as we discover new things, our knowledge grows and changes,” she says. Credit: Jack Horner, Fabio Pastori.
“Palaeontology is no different. So, it’s inevitable that in the decades since Walking With Dinosaurs in 1999 we will have discovered new fossils and advanced our thinking on how dinosaurs looked and behaved. Walking With Dinosaurs and even Jurassic Park both used the most up to date information available to them to present believable dinosaurs, and I think the care they took means these depictions still hold up really well today.”
Richards says Prehistoric Planet “established a new gold standard for dinos on screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if little kids watching Prehistoric Planet thought the dinosaurs were real, the CGI and behaviours depicted were astoundingly realistic.”
But some palaeontologists are worried that we’re not going far enough in showing dinosaurs as real animals.
The fossil hunter’s view
Jack Horner is arguably the world’s best known palaeontologist (and, it’s said, partly the inspiration behind Jurassic Park’s Dr Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill).
Horner has spent decades studying some of North America’s most famous dinosaurs, like Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus.
Speaking via Zoom from his home in Montana, Horner is quiet yet authoritative – exactly as I remember him from the dozens of dino documentaries I watched in the 1990s and 2000s. The only difference is his hair has gotten wispier and whiter.
He believes that much of how we imagine dinosaurs – from how they look to how they act – is still bound up with our own learnt biases.
“We have a lot of T. rex skeletons,” Horner says. “We still argue about how they got their meat. I’m still a strong advocate of T. rex being an opportunist. The people that think that it’s an apex predator – I think we have to think that this just based on opinion, their own biases, because there’s no evidence for it.
“There are people that say there’s a broken off [T. rex] tooth in an animal that survived afterwards. [Can they] show me exactly how the T. Rex had to bite this animal in order for a tooth to be lodged in the centrum of vertebrae and not alter the neural spine, which is the most fragile part of the thing? How do you actually break a tooth off inside of the hard part of the bone and not disturb the fragile part of the bone? It just doesn’t make any sense – unless, of course, the animal was sitting or laying down on the ground already.
“Lots of scientists just want T. rex to be an apex predator and so they’re going to do science the opposite way it’s supposed to be done, they’re going to look for evidence to support their theory.”
Horner is particularly vexed by the how dinosaurs are painted… literally.
“Since the beginning of finding dinosaurs, people have been making them grey and brown. I say, since we don’t know, a vividly coloured dinosaur is just as accurate as a brown one. The preponderance of evidence suggests that they would be vividly coloured because birds are dinosaurs and if they can be vividly coloured – especially the birds with crests on their heads or snouts; all of those bony crests are colourful – then why not at least vividly colour the accoutrements on the heads of the dinosaurs like the horned dinosaurs and the duck-billed dinosaurs?”
“While some dinosaurs are known from beautifully complete skeletons, most individual species are represented only by a few fragmentary fossils”
It all goes to the case Horner makes to promote an image of dinosaurs that’s much more interesting.
“Theropod dinosaurs should be feathered and I think they should be colourful. Birds are pretty, and we assume they evolved prettiness on their own because dinosaurs couldn’t be pretty.
“We assume dinosaurs have to be mean and nasty and eat people. That’s our general consensus of dinosaurs, but there’s nothing to suggest that it’s right.
“Birds couldn’t have evolved all of these incredible features all on their own. They were already birds, you know, long before dinosaur extinction. There’s nothing to suggest that birds didn’t acquire these features from their ancestors.”
All singing, all dancing
“Dinosaurs probably weren’t as exciting as we’d like to make them,” says Horner.
“They were just normal animals. People trying to sell something, whether it be a TV show or a movie, are going to over-sensationalise the behaviours of animals.”
Hazel Richards agrees: “I am loving the increased emphasis in media like Prehistoric Planet on dinosaurs as animals – showing them not just mindless bloodthirsty monsters snarling and killing one another, but doing normal everyday things that we know animals do, and did in the past, like grooming, communicating, migrating, nesting, feeding.
“Not necessarily ‘thrilling’ behaviours, but nuanced and believable and fascinating, nonetheless. I love the idea of kids growing up thinking of dinosaurs not as fictional beasts, but as real animals that walked the same Earth we do and were part of ecosystems as complex and interesting as those we see today.”
Both Horner and Richards are adamant that we ought to get creative when it comes to depicting dinosaurs.
“I’m not that concerned with pedantic ‘accuracy’ of these newer depictions of dinosaurs,” says Richards. “I find the speculative colours, soft tissues and behaviours shown in shows really interesting and engaging, and as long as they are presented as ‘educated guesses’ and not settled scientific consensus I think it is a great way to make people rethink their preconceptions about what past worlds were like.”
“Scientifically accurate?” exclaims Horner. “We don’t know they’re accurate. I just don’t like us staying with one thing that we don’t know is right.
“Somebody recently made a model of Sue the T. rex as a big giant hippopotamus-looking thing, and it’s all grey. I don’t understand that at all. I’d make it pink. Seriously. There’s no reason T. rex couldn’t have been feathered and pink and danced and sang. Everybody just laughs at that. But it’s just as accurate as that big hippopotamus grey-coloured thing.”
Not only should we consider updating how we see the dinosaurs we all know and love, says Richards, we should embrace the myriad animals that lived in prehistory.
“In the future I’d be super interested in seeing greater diversity of extinct critters on our screens,” Richards says.
“Yeah, T. rex is cool, but we’re discovering dozens of new dinosaurs every year, not to mention the vast array of other fascinating fossil species that would make for great viewing, like bizarre Cambrian invertebrates or early mammal-like reptiles.”
“I am loving the increased emphasis on dinosaurs as animals – showing them not just mindless bloodthirsty monsters … but doing normal everyday things that we know animals do.”
So: it could be your dinosaur imaginings from earlier need a bit of updating to keep up with scientific knowledge – and also for fun. Cast off those grey and brown overcoats and break out the bright party colours. More feathers. Louder voices.
Yes, dinosaurs were just animals doing normal animal things including eating, sleeping and general moseying about. But they may also have been more interesting in just about every way.
Now close your eyes and picture a dinosaur again. Maybe this time it’s colourful, with ornamental feathers and a snood. Maybe it’s dancing with its family. As palaeontological research continues to learn, let your imagination run wild.