dinosaurs :3

i genuinely find it so upsetting that i will never know what a dinosaur actually looked like. like yes, we have their skeletons, but you know what we don't have? literally everything else. we don't have any cartilage, hair, feathers, skin, nothing; because those things don't fossilize!!

if you think about a tyrannosaurus rex, you think of this, right?

but what if they didn't look literally anything like this? what if they had different structures on their bodies made out of cartilage? then we'd be completely wrong and now we're just as clueless as we started. what if they weren't giant lizards and actually had fur, or feathers? what if, despite their sharp teeth, they were actually herbivores and not carnivores like we think they were? we have literally no clue.

if i died and all that remained was my skeleton, and someone who had never seen me before in their life was asked to draw me, they would get it completely wrong. you know why? because we're all humans with the same basic skeletal structure, but we're all so unique! someone trying to draw me based off my skeleton wouldn't know that my nose has a little bump, they wouldn't know my eyes are hazel, they wouldn't know how my hair looked, or how my body looked in general, because fat doesn't fossilize either. they wouldn't know how my skin looked, or that i have little freckles, or that i have two scars on the same knee from being stupid and falling or crashing into a fence on my bike. they wouldn't know i wear glasses. they wouldn't know me, they wouldn't know what i look like.

it's the same with the megalodon but way more extreme, because sharks are entirely cartilage and have nothing that can fossilize except their teeth. we think, based off their teeth, they would be basically just a big great white, right? but what if we're wrong? what if they looked more dinosaur-esque? what if they didn't look like modern day sharks at all? we literally do not know!! that makes me so sad, like i can look at a dinosaur skeleton or a megalodon's tooth but i'll never know what that animal really looked like.