It's only been a couple of hundred years since we identified the first dinosaur fossils. Since then, we've learned an awful lot about them, yet our knowledge is limited by what they left behind. Bones can fossilize, but there is a dearth of soft tissue, skin, hair, feathers, and all those things that we recognize existing species by. Since dinos were categorized as reptiles, we envisioned them as a prehistoric version of known lizards, with muscles and scaly skin draped over the bones. In the last few decades, better science tools have enabled us to detect clues about how wrong we were.
Our ignorance about what dinosaurs looked like is more a matter of lack of evidence than a lack of imagination, but the more we learn about real dinosaurs and other extinct species, the more we should imagine how conventional wisdom can be wrong. Kurzgesagt takes us through what we know and what we might extrapolate from new information about dinosaurs and other extinct species.
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