Dinosaurs: Do we actually know what they looked like?
A paleoartist shows us how we can make a guess based on fossilized evidence
Picture a dinosaur.
If you're thinking of a giant scaly creature straight out of Jurassic Park, you're not alone.
Many of our ideas about what dinosaurs look like are based on how they appear in pop culture, which in turn is based on paleontologists' understanding of dinosaurs at the time.
Between the 1960s and the '80s, we went from thinking of dinosaurs as cold-blooded lizards that dragged their tails to seeing them as active, warm-blooded animals. This shift influenced the look of the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park that so many of us are familiar with today.
Our impressions of dinosaurs have changed dramatically over time, and as new fossil evidence is discovered, our ideas about what dinosaurs looked like will continue to evolve. For example, scientists now believe most theropods, including velociraptors, were covered in feathers.
In this episode of The Nature of Things 101, Anthony Morgan and Sarika Cullis-Suzuki dig up the latest research on dinosaur fossils. They get a crash course in paleoart and learn how to determine what dinos looked like.
Even though humans have been finding dinosaur bones for centuries, and probably much longer, the term "dinosaur" (translation: "terrible lizard") came from Dinosauria — the taxonomic group created in 1842 by pioneering paleontologist and naturalist Richard Owen to classify the extinct animals. The first depictions of dinosaurs were hulking neckless lizards that walked on all fours.
Today, roughly 180 years later, there are more people than ever searching for dinosaur fossils. New discoveries and technologies are rapidly changing what we know about these long-extinct giants. Who knows how we'll view dinosaurs in the future?