swans
According to an interesting thought experiment of "Artist and Researcher" C. M. Koseman's (ah, but are we not all artists and researchers?) this is what a swan would look like "if we drew modern animals the way we draw dinosaurs, based on bones alone". Having questioned this monstering of dinosaurs myself, I would like to support Koseman's work, so here's more of it, accompanied by some relevant ponderings from this post on the old myspace blog back in May, 2009:
"I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not only he, but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be...
"And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something and paint it killing something else...
"Seeing the bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE...
"I wanted a time machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace."
You can see Koseman's full TED talk here. He's not a natural public speaker possibly, or indeed a scientist, but he's not claiming to be, he's just having some not unhelpful fun with the unknown. I wonder who the woman in the pictures is, whether she's real, or just another of Koseman's speculations. She's there to give a sense of human scale, I know. But, ah, are we not all here to give a sense of human scale?
Finally, on the subject of dinosaurs actually being lovely, have a listen to this but be warned, it's powerful stuff:
Fenn, my nearly 4 year old daughter, recorded her first ever solo song today. She came up with all the words herself and I helped her a little bit with the tune. It’s called ‘Dinosaurs in Love’. 🦕❤️🦕 pic.twitter.com/erCgG0sUvP— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) January 28, 2020
UPDATERY: There is science behind Koseman's work. Ned Mond's just sent me a link it here.
Wouldn't it be delightfully ironic if our widely accepted depictions of dinosaurs turned out to be just as inaccurate as the Victorian sculptures in Crystal Palace Park?
ReplyDelete(Incidentally, I do love Crystal Palace Park, whose existence I may or may not have discovered from an old blog post of yours. And now I'm off to listen to Captain Dinosaur for the millionth time.)