How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Looked Like?

Can we really reconstruct a dinosaur’s appearance from a bunch of million-year-old fossils? How?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and we're the host
of Stuff. You should know the podcast that's right, And
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(00:22):
Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, I'm Christian Saga and
this is brain Stuff. Dinosaurs are super old and they
are also super popular. We see them in movies, museums,
children's toys, cartoons, and more. But how do we know
what they actually looked like? It all comes down to fossils.

(00:44):
Think of reconstructing a dinosaur's appearance like putting together a
jigsaw puzzle. The fossils are the pieces on the edge
of the puzzle, but most of the other pieces are missing.
So while they don't tell us everything, fossils are the
best starting point for figuring out a dinosaurs appearance. The
way the bones fit together can give us a basic
understanding of a dinosaur's shape and posture. We can learn

(01:07):
a lot from the teeth to flat leaf shaped teeth
indicate herbivores, while sharp pointed teeth suggests a carnivore. Cavities
in the skull can help us figure out how well
a dinosaur could see or hear. We also use CT
scans to build three D images of the skeletons. From there,
we can add virtual layers of tissue, muscle and skin.

(01:28):
Under very rare conditions, a dinosaurs soft tissue can fossilize too.
In paleontologist Tyler License found in Edmonton Soaurus in North Dakota,
the skin and muscle tissue of its fossil remained intact.
CT scans of the body have revealed a treasure trove
of new information about dinosaurs. And here's the weirdest thing.

(01:50):
Dinosaurs weren't all scaly creatures like crocodiles or Godzilla. Some
had weird filaments all over their bodies, which dinosaur expert
Brian Switte calls dino fuzz. And some dinosaurs even had feathers.
We can tell by quill barbed marks little bumps where
feathers connect to bone. These marks aren't just one or
two obscure species either. We're talking about famous dinos like velociraptors.

(02:15):
It turns out quite a few dinosaurs had these feathers,
or technically something like feathers. Not every paleontologist is comfortable
with the name, preferring to describe these markings as into
gumentary structures or proto feathers instead, but these feathers and
feather like structures may have been pretty colorful too. In

(02:35):
scientists analyzed a micro raptor fossil with a scanning electron
microscope and found evidence of melanosomes. These are the organelles
inside a cell that store melanin or pigment. Different types
of melanosomes store different colors. This is the same stuff
that determines your hair color. The researchers found that this
microraptor had an irridescent glossy coat. As scientists look for

(02:59):
more fossilized melanosomes, they're reconstructing the appearance of Earth's ancient
dinosaurs with increasing and impressive accuracy. Not a bad job
considering they're literally working with a pile of bones. Check
out the Brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on

(03:21):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com.