Every time I see something like this, I think of that meme about how wrong we’d get penguins, if all we had to go on was a skeleton.

I've wondered for a while if it would be possible to train an AI to create visualisations of dinosaurs and extinct animals.

We've got sample data from living creatures and their skeletons, so if we could somehow traing a model that takes data from the skeletons (3d models? pictures?) as input and the animal as output, we could then apply that to skeletons found from past eras.

Granted, I only have a very basic understanding of machine learning so this is probably an absurd idea for a multitude of reasons I'm ignorant of.

I think that is a fascinating idea.

Skeletons give you a lot more to go on than the meme implies. We know, for example, where the muscles attach, and how strong those attachments are, giving a good proxy for how large the muscle is. It also reveals the angle of attachment, which tells you a lot about its posture, how it moved, and what kind of musculature would be required to support it.

That is calibrated against lots of existing species, and some rare fossils give even more evidence of body shape, giving opportunities to calibrate it further.

There's a lot of delicate inference and opportunities to go wrong, but it's not as haphazard as the meme suggests. The reconstructions are based on much finer details of the skeleton, including microscopic ones.

link?

Probably this: https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9429647872/h73AD2FFA/twittercom41s...

Or an addition to it: https://img.ifunny.co/images/458ec9c84c00a2ec331b511115f302c...

People should really retire the word "reptile". It's not monophyletic, and if you fix it so it is it includes mammals.

It's a shorthand in common parlance, and not every group needs to be monophyletic to be useful.

Maybe. But this one isn't imo. How can it be useful to call snakes, birds, crocodiles and pterosaurs "reptile"? It makes no sense. At least if you exclude avemetatarsalia it says something about scaly skin and stuff, but that's not the common parlance use so in my opinion it's better to just throw the entire word in the bin :)

Just a small note. The skeleton of the T-Rex named Tristan Otto is not in Berlin anymore. It is now on display at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen. I saw it on Friday and it is quite spectacular!