![]() Sometimes we are missing a lot more, often the most unique parts of the animal. If there were no living camels left, who would imagine them having fatty humps? In some cases we may not even have living animals with analogous tissues to compare to. Was it covered in skin or a keratinous sheath, did it have an inflatable sac like a balloon, was it a resonating chamber for sounds, did it help the animal cool? If the structure of the underlying bone can't provide an answer, and there is no soft tissue preservation in related taxa, we're just left to speculate. There may be a mystery structure in the skull that we can't really be sure of. Maybe we have footprints that show what sorts of pads or claw/nail shapes to reconstruct. That said, for a lot of animals we know next to nothing past the minimal. Thanks to them, we can estimate the "minimal dinosaur", a creature that has every muscle and organ and piece of tissue we can directly read from its skeleton, as indicated by fossils with exquisite preservation or surviving close relatives with homologous structures. We have exceptionally preserved specimens, whether mummified or from lagerstätte that give us a fairly clear idea what some species at least looked like. Also keep in mind that I'm not an expert at all, this is just what I'm intuiting as somebody with decent casual knowledge about evolution and paleontology. To be clear, this wouldn't be a slam dunk - there are still animals with a body plan similar to beavers who have more typical rodent tails like nutrias and musk rats, but this method is never perfect. These animals both have broad, flat, paddle-shaped tails to help propel their bodies through the water, so it's probable that at least some scientists would start reconstructing them with a tail somewhere in the ballpark of what that had in life. A thin, otter-like tail wouldn't be as useful for swimming on a body like this, so scientists would then look to other aquatic mammals that have a stocky body plan, such as manatees and platypuses. You wouldn't even need to use math to estimate the density of its muscle/fat for this, just take a look at its skeleton and you can clearly see its barrel-shaped ribcage. ![]() This would be an interesting discovery, since unlike most aquatic mammals which are sleek and hydrodynamic, the beaver is quite stocky and round. Scientists could look at its skeleton and recognize that it was a semi-aquatic animal based on the shape of its feet. Paleontologists dedicate their entire lives to poring over every minute detail of the animal kingdom so they can make the best guesses possible as to what features a dinosaur may or may not have based on their ecological niche.įor example, let's say the beaver was extinct but we had decent fossil evidence of it. Yes, but keep in mind there's a big difference between guesswork and educated guesswork.
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