Headbangosaurus

It was hotter back then.

Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There's fundamentally just a lot we don't know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we've learned a lot more. We've become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I'm not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.

But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn't have this "shrink wrapped" appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it's plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn't a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn't a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn't one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?

Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.

Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.

The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise.

I feel like a better way to represent "the threshold of the known" would be sort of the pictorial equivalent of "error bars" — instead of doing one image showing an animal that basically looks like it has mange because that's all you can be sure of, do a matrix of images that show various extremes of possibilities.

And a cat

That's a bison, not a buffalo. Buffalo don't have those humps.

Its pretty common to be that level of knowledgeable. A lot of people are casually interested enough about animals and biology to have heard discussions about muscular structures that they can determine when something doesn't work. It doesn't mean they can form their own hypothesis on what a spinosaurus skeletal structure is used for, especially if he knows that even experts are still arguing about it until today.

It's wiser to trust the words of someone who knows his own limitations and admits to it than someone who confidently uses a word without knowing the meaning. You can't seem to grasp that people can have a varied level of knowledge about different things within the same subject.

You're basically saying that someone being confident about your car having a puncture is being paradoxical if he also doesn't have the confidence to say what punctured it.

How does paleo art work now? What's done differently?