Fun fact, this may actually account for many of the “imaginings” we have of extinct animals.

I had a molecular biology professor who referred it to “vacuum packing” where many extinct animals are rendered slimmer or muscular than they may have been, since things like body fat and fur are not preserved during fossilization. So our view of animals like dinosaurs may be entirely inaccurate.

There’s actually a book, All Yesterdays, in which the artist, CM Koseman, draws modern animals as we might have interpreted them to look if we found them extinct the same way do dinosaurs.

Fun examples include:

The manatee

An elephant

Swans

And literally the picture of the hippo

Another funny thing to add to this…because of how fossils are formed, it’s possible we don’t know what type of dinosaurs were different species or the same species.  If we compare the skeletons to modern animals, snake skeletons often look pretty much the same so if all snakes were extinct we may believe they were all one species of animal instead of hundreds.  Meanwhile, all dog breeds are considered the same species Canis lupus familiaris (technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of Canus lupus, the Grey Wolf, but you get what I mean) despite their skeletons being drastically different from each other (compare a pug skull to a great dane and to a poodle…they’ll look different).

So, if all snakes were mistaken for being only a small handful of species and modern dogs could be mistaken for a BUNCH of unique different species…think about how that knowledge can reflect onto our current understanding of extinct animals.

It goes deeper than that. A colleague of mine who’s a paleontologist was commenting on how for some extant species of birds, we can only tell species apart through behavior traits like song. You could have two perfectly preserved dead specimens of bird, but you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart because you need to hear their songs to tell their species apart. She said that she is sometimes kept awake by thoughts of the implications of this for species classifications in paleontology, and whether we collapse huge swaths of species in the fossil record into just one species because we can’t tell them apart just with the information we havd