We know a lot about how the muscles sits on bone, how different bone density and shapes affect strength and thus possible uses. We can also draw a lot from reptiles and living dinosaurs (birds) by looking at analogous structures that are widely present in existing animals.

This sort of news has been going around the Brazilian internet for quite a while to the point that a fairly well known paleontologist and science communication showed the process of how this reconstruction would be made (video, in portuguese: https://youtu.be/8TPPFcZpCbA)

- From the teeth shape and abrasion patterns we can tell that this was a herbivorous animal.

- Muscle attachment points intm the jaw and huge concave regions suggests large and powerful jaw muscles, so the hollow skinny picture in the article is not viable.

- Being a herbivore with powerful jaw muscles, this animal would need to chew on food a lot. Without cheeks, food would fall out as the animal chews, so it clearly has cheeks.

- Eyew need to fit in the ocular orbit, so they're not tint dots, they're large eyes.

- if we knew any surviving mammal, we would know this animal probably had eyelids (all mammals do).

- This head is huge and heavy, so we'll need a bunch of muscles to keep it up, so this animal has a chunky neck as well.

You can see what the reconstruction would look like with this info at ~40 minutes into the video.

It's the Daily Mail - wild inaccuracy goes without saying.

Baboons are terrifying in any context.

I don't think most dinosaurs are seen as monsters. When it comes to public relations "monsters", I think it's mostly T-Rex, and usually it isn't portrayed as skeletal. Depictions of most dinosaurs make them look cute.

Really interesting article about this:

Terrible lizards and the wrath of God: How 19th century Christianity and Romanticism affected visual representations of dinosaurs and our perceptions of the ancient world: https://web.archive.org/web/20200905194215/https://web.stanf...

that's selection bias. only the avian 'dinosaurs' survived, but calling them dinosaurs would be like calling humans rodents. It's not like birds existed back then.

There seems to be a rush to try and put feathers on everything. We are finding some amazing specimens that are giving us amazing detail, such as the ankylosaur found in Canada. Yup, covered in scales and hard armor.

Now we got this T-rex crazed idea to put feathers all over them. It sort of reminds me of the 1990s who tried to put t-rex as scavengers / non predators because of 1 solitary data point. the data strongly suggests they were scaled (we found skin impressions of t-rex, they had scales). So now they are trying to say 'oh well maybe they had feathers elsewhere, or were covered in feathers when young'. sheesh.

> "Unfortunately, unlike bones, feathers do not fossilize really well"

if a leaf can be fossilized, I imagine so can a feather.

No, humans did not evolve from rodents. It's more like calling humans primates.

>It's not like birds existed back then.

Back when? There were birds before the other dinosaurs went extinct, so concurrently with T-Rex.

Its my understanding humans evolved from a rodent like creature that existed during the time of the dinosaurs. primates did not exist then.

also, humans did not evolve from primates. humans are primates.

Our ancestors might at some point have been rodent-like, in the sense that they looked somewhat like rodents (or rather, some rodents still look like them, as the rodents also evolved from the same ancestor). But they weren't rodents, and they didn't have the incisors that characterize rodents.

>also, humans did not evolve from primates. humans are primates

Yes, we evolved from primates, and thus still are primates, like how birds still are dinosaurs.

Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_birds

We are more related with some groups of gliding mammals than with rodents.

https://www.dkfindout.com/us/dinosaurs-and-prehistoric-life/...

The dinosaurs from which birds are descended are thought to have feathers or something similar, in some case or at some stages of life. But that's a really long way from being the default or even a sizeable enough majority that one could say "the dinosaurs had feathers" as a generalization and do so with a straight face.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/welcome-to-jurassic-a...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Yesterdays

They do not actually espouse any radical ideas about the actual appearance of Dinosaurs. Like most mainstream paleontologist, they do see to believe that some or most members of the theropods could have had some amount of feathers. They seem open to the idea that other dinosaur groups and possibly archosaurs may have had something like feathers in some cases.

The have a podcast that I listen to frequently “Tetrapods Zoology Podcast”. It is interesting, informative, and tedious in places because… they are scientists acting a bit goofy but still scientists.

If we have even a single mud impression somehere, and we do, then this implication is DailyMail, I mean garbage.

Similarly, unless you take an artist who currently draws dinosaurs to the best of their ability with all current anatomical understanding, and THEY produce these drawings from a monkey etc, then again, DailyMail, I mean garbage.

"These drawings I made are stupid" on no way proves that "therefor those drawings you made are stupid."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE