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I used to trust museum reconstruction drawings, then I saw the actual bones in a basement in Chicago
I always took those clean dinosaur sketches in textbooks as fact until a curator at the Field Museum showed me the actual fossil slabs in storage and half the skeleton was plaster. Now I only read papers that list what percentage of the animal is real bone, because 40 percent replica and 100 percent replica look the same in a drawing. Anyone else started checking the mount notes before believing a new find is complete?
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tyler36821d ago
Tbh I started doing the same thing after reading about that T. rex they had to redo because they mixed up bones from two different animals. The mount notes thing is smart though, because even papers will bury the real bone count in a table somewhere instead of saying it up front. Once you know how many casts are in a mount, you stop seeing a complete animal and start seeing a puzzle someone guessed at.
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carter.julia21d ago
Plus half the "complete" skeletons on display are composites from a dozen different sites anyway.
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parkergarcia21d ago
Oh man, my buddy got hit with this exact thing last year at a museum out west. He spent a whole afternoon sketching this raptor skeleton for a class, only to find out later that like half the thing was plaster and the real bones came from two spots miles apart. He was so heated lol, said he felt like he'd been drawing a sculpture instead of a fossil. The part that got him was nobody lied exactly, the info was just sitting in some footnote he never would've found on his own. So yeah @tyler368, once you see it as a guess, it's kinda hard to unsee it, and now he checks the mount notes before he even pulls out his sketchbook.
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