Soft-tissue shockers!

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All your dinosaurs are wrong.

I mean ALL of them. Every few years we hear of x revision or y development in how artists "need" to restore dinosaurs, as new information is discovered. Some of it valid scientific data, the rest over-hyped happenstance. We've seen relatively valid changes to dinosaurs' appearance in the last few decades (such as light feathers on coelurosaur-line theropods and deep skin folds on the shoulders of duckbills) to unexplained and largely unwarranted innovations (like GSP's overly thickened "bison necks" on his duckbills and tropical raptors seemingly drowning in a 60kg pile of big clumsy turkey feathers) to downright inexplicable bandwagon flip-flops based on whatever paper gets more press coverage on dumbed-down "mainstream" media (such as the rapid bounce-back of many ignorant copycat artists not worth naming, in the practice of changing many sauropod necks from horizontal (copying after Alexander) to vertical (after Bakker and GSP) to horizontal (after Stevens & Parrish) and then back again (after Taylor, Wedel and Naish), all without doing any research on the validity of each one's points or lack thereof.

But now with the discovery of yet another Edmontosaurus mummy, it becomes evident that the formerly flat-headed duckbill had a fleshy rooster-like display crest with absolutely no bone core: blogs.scientificamerican.com/o….

Or at least one of the two sexes had it as an adult. And this blows a hole in everything we thought we knew about dinosaur anatomy.

Think of what this means for a second... if a species as seemingly plain and commonly understood as Edmontosaurus regalis had soft-tissue features that we never knew about before, which the bones don't even hint at, what can this mean about less well-known dinosaurs that are known from only one or two good skeletons and no skin impressions?

If we find a Malawisaurus mummy, is it going to have fleshy dragon whiskers on its lower jaw? Did Yutyrannus have soft tentacles on its nostrils like a star-nosed mole? Was Concavenator's bizarre "dorsal fin" part of a much larger and more complex array of mostly soft-tissue display structures? Were the crests of big-nosed sauropods just a simple nasal chamber, or the core of a much larger inflatable resonating structure, with interdermal colors which can be revealed through inflating, then retracted between duller-colored segments of skin by deflating, like the display patches on certain birds and baboons? For now, you be the judge.

Of course it's not that controversial for those of us (like Brian Engh) who have long speculated that dinosaurs' life appearance involved far more extensive display structures than what we can find evidence for in most fossils. Only now there's a little baseball-sized piece of fossil proof for it. And now we know for sure that no matter how imaginitive (like Engh), or how conservative (like myself), you draw your dinosaurs, chances are you're all (albeit unequally) wrong. But that won't stop us from trying. We don't yet have an InGen or a Jurassic park, and now there will be many more revisions to Edmontosaurus, and who knows what next. Go crazy once in a while, you may get lucky and second-guess the next soft-tissue phenomenon. I'll see you all in the cloning room.
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