It’s not unusual for paleontologists to disagree about ancient animal bodies — sometimes with a ferocious intensity. Gottfried recalled witnessing some scientists get into a heated disagreement over the angle of the thigh bone when assembling a triceratops specimen.The bit about shrink-wrapping the skin around the skeletons was interesting. I have a book on my Kindle shelf titled All Yesterdays that's a neat look at how illustrations of prehistoric animals have evolved over time, and also has some freaky-looking pictures of modern animals if they were reconstructed by yesterday's paleontologic illustrators from skeletal remains. You'll never look at cows... or your cat ...the same way.
John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, is part of the team that put forward the controversial 3D model of the megalodon. He said that the stakes are always high in science, but particularly when working on species that attract both public and scientific fascination.
“The more celebrity an extinct animal has, and the rarer it is, the more competitive or heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said. “I know this all too well. I worked on T. rex.”
Hutchinson said that, early in his career, people used 2D illustrations of fossilized skeletons and shrink-wrapped skin around them, making them quite skinny. Based on these models, people believed Tyrannosaurus rex was around 11,000 pounds. But now, using various methods, scientists mostly agree that an adult T. rex would have been somewhere around 17,000 pounds.
When I was a kid, brontosauruses dragged their tails across the ground as the slid through the bog from one lake to the next, now they gallop in herds... and T. rex has feathers. Science is always on the move and adapting to new data.
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