Name: What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like?
Uploaded: 2022-03-09T01:31:42.000Z
Duration: 11 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The past is a vast and mysterious land that begins at the big bang and ends in the present,

It is the home of everything that came before, the key to understanding our present.

Here we find the most amazing creatures to ever roam our planet, hundreds of millions

of species so diverse that our imagination cannot do them justice.

Unfortunately the past carefully guards its secrets.

While there are a lot of things about the past we know, there are way more things we

And worse, there are probably even more things we don't even know that we don't know

Think of the wonder of life: We now recognize about 1.5 million eukaryotic species but there

may be as many as 10 million alive today.

And although we are adding some 15,000 new species to our collective knowledge each year,

the vast majority of life on earth is still undiscovered.

An estimated four billion species emerged on our planet in past eons.

But at least 99% of them died out, way before humans spoke the first words.

The vast majority of all the different species that ever existed are so utterly deleted that

they have become part of the “unknown unknown” part of the past, lost to us forever.

Could we use science and imagination to glimpse a shadow of the unreachable past?

To learn about creatures of the past we need fossils, any sort of remains preserved from

past geological ages – bones or shells, impressions or imprints, things preserved

The totality of all fossils on earth is called the fossil record and it is the most important

For a dead animal to fossilize a number of things must go just right: The right environment,

And then the fossil needs to survive for millions or hundreds of millions of years and then

get back to the surface – and then be discovered before natural processes dissolve it.

So it is kind of a miracle that we have what we have and know what we know.

Take the dinosaurs since they were one of the largest and most successful groups of

animals for some 165 million years – and are also a lot of fun to animate.

What were they really like and what are we missing?

In the last 200 years we've found tens of thousands of fossils from over 1000 dinosaur

Lately we've entered a golden era of discovery and about 50 new dinosaur species are discovered

each year, expanding what we know and what we know that we don't know about them, which

But it also makes us aware of all the things lost to the past forever.

Imagine if we took all the animals that lived in the last 50 million years and randomly

chose 10000 individuals from 1000 species to fossilize.

Think about all the things that would be missed, or that seem too weird to be true.

Like the Giraffe, a yellow animal with brown patterns that looks like a horse and an antelope

had a baby, with a long neck and two tiny hairy horns.

How many “dinosaur giraffes” were there?

Animals so weird and selected for ecological niches so specific that evolution molded their

bodies very absurdly - today they might seem made up to us..

We know a lot of species are lost forever just because of the environment they lived

For example, lush jungles basically prevent fossilization as the chances that an animal

Countless scavengers of all sizes break down freshly deceased animals extremely quickly

and the soil is often so acidic that bones are dissolved.

And so fossils of dinosaurs from jungles are practically nonexistent.

Today half of all known species live in the few remaining rainforests that only cover

Millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed earth, jungles covered much more of the planet.

So besides some insects and other small animals trapped in amber, there should be millions

of species that emerged and vanished, without leaving any trace.

Trapped deep inside the unknown, unknown.

What remains the longest are the crystalized parts of your bones and so most dinosaur fossils

are bones or teeth – usually fragments, not entire skeletons.

This means that almost all boneless or shell-less animals are practically wiped from the fossil

If we take a look at the stunning diversity of weird animals like worms, jellyfish and

slugs alive today we can only speculate what we are missing.

Although thankfully many mostly soft and gooey species also left us an incredible diversity

of shells that tell us an amazing amount about our past, so at least we have that.

Still when we think about all the boneless species that may have existed in the last

half billion years even our best attempt at imagining them falls short.

But it's not like reimagining something based on its bones is straightforward and so the

way we envisage what dinosaurs actually looked like has changed a lot in the last few years.

In the past many illustrations had a bony, minimalistic look, with a toothy grin to signify

But if we draw today's animals in a similar way, based on their skeletons, just for the

fun of it, we get the most bizarre creatures.

Elephants, swans and baboons that look like monsters right out of nightmares.

So similar to animals today, we should imagine dinosaurs with much more soft tissue, fat

bellies or chests, weird soft parts like skin flaps, lips and gums and just more pronounced

features that would make them seem like much more pleasant fellows.

Some soft features actually leave distinctive traces on bones that we can look for in the

skeletons of extinct animals, which is where today's animals with similar features are

Because we know what the feathers of living birds look like, modern technology combined

with the exceedingly rare fossils with preserved remains of fuzzy feathers give us a glimpse

We know that tiny Sinosauropteryx had a striped tail and its tiny dino buddy Anchiornis huxleyi

was white and black with gorgeous red feathers around its head.

Still, for the vast majority of really any ancient extinct species we have no real clue

But we know what modern dinosaurs, birds, look like and here we find the most amazing

So some dinosaurs will have tried to blend into the background, while others might have