Scaly Spotted Feathered Frilled: How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Really Looked Like?

Scientists know a great deal about dinosaurs, except for one big unanswered (and likely unanswerable) question: what did they actually look like? With only a few rare fossilizations of soft parts, many dinosaur characteristics -- from skin color and texture to thickness of muscles and facial expressions -- remain a mystery. To create images for books, scientific reports, and museums, paleoartists use scientific evidence and a dash of artistic license to come up with the best possible approximations. Thimmesh's explanations of this process are informative and well researched, including quotes from interviews with six prominent paleoartists. Decisions about the positioning of the dinosaurs, how to portray movement, whether they traveled in groups or alone, even the plants, landscapes, and other species associated with their habitats must be carefully grounded in the best available evidence. The book's thoughtful design shows a historical progression of our knowledge of dinosaurs, sometimes with early-twentieth-century art placed alongside modern images for comparison, or sequences of pictures that show how an artist takes a sketch of a fossilized skull and moves, step by step, to re-create facial details. Captions for the illustrations are very detailed and just as informative as the main text. Readers will come away from this excellent book with a new appreciation for dinosaur imagery and for the talented paleoartists who produce it. danielle j. ford