Science, and The Lie of Certainty
When you were a child, you probably learned in school what a dinosaur was. You probably learned about their habitats. You probably have seen their pictures in your textbooks.
Not to mention seeing them in movies like Jurassic Park, The Land Before Time, The Good Dinosaur, etc.
Except thinking about what dinosaurs look like, you probably realize that they have changed. Our understanding of what they most likely look like has changed. And in the media that we consume, the dinosaurs look differently today than they did 30 years ago.
Even in media, the dinosaurs depicted in The Good Dinosaur look different from what we saw in Jurassic Park.
As children, you were probably certain about what dinosaurs look like. They're in books, after all!
Maybe you still feel a certainty today. Maybe you think that the new more hairy and feathery dinosaurs that we would see in modern images are what they actually look like and this is going to stay the same and never change.
So allow me to inform you that, unfortunately, your certainty is misplaced.
The truth is, even as much as we know about dinosaurs today, we will probably never know exactly what they looked like. There are some things that just don't fossilize and won't be preserved.
We can guess at their habitats, at their behavior, and scientists can get a whole lot right.
But we will probably never have textbooks that will 100% portray what a dinosaur looked like.
And this is pretty sad to me. Because I like to know the answers to questions. I want to understand the natural world as much as possible. I would love to be able to see what a dinosaur actually looked like, be able to observe one up close... Preferably without getting eaten.
But some things just aren't possible.
There is no fault in admitting that.
But there is fault in clinging to a present idea of what a dinosaur looks like.
To pretend like science has all of the answers. That the popular theories about what dinosaur behavior might have been like is 100% confirmed. When in reality, there's a good chance that our understanding of them might change dramatically in the next 20 years, 50 years, and 100 years. And even a century later, we still won't be able to know everything.
There's a fantastic paleoart book you may have heard of called All Yesterdays that presents alternatives for how dinosaurs may have looked based on recent findings and some creative liberties in some cases.
One example of this is the Leaellynasaura. This is what this dinosaur would have looked like according to Wikipedia:
All Yesterdays presents an alternative possibility though based on the same skeleton.
This is dramatically different from what we see in the first image. But they give pretty solid reasoning for these liberties.
As seen before with Hypsilophodon, many small plant-eating dinosaurs will have their popular images greatly revised thanks to new discoveries of social behaviour and integument. Instead of looking like two-legged iguanas, these animals will have to be re-imagined with the extra possibilities offered by furry bodies and communal living habits.
Here is one more small ornithischian re-interpretation, this time featuring Leaellynasaura. This dinosaur was discovered in Australia, where it lived during Early Cretaceous times, about one hundred and ten million years ago. At that time, Australia was located close to the Earth's geographic south pole. Although its climate was possibly not as cold as today's Antarctic, the axial tilt of our planet meant that Cretaceous Australia did not receive direct sunlight for long periods of time, and almost certainly experienced sub-zero temperatures.
Aside from being a polar dinosaur, Leaellynasaura was also extraordinary for its immensely long tail, which was almost three times as long as its body. Nobody knows why Leaellynasaura had such a long tail, or what it used it for. Theories range from the tail being used as a climbing aid, a sexual and social display feature, or a long, shaggy āscarfā that the dinosaur wrapped around itself as protection from the cold. It has even been suggested that the tail aided the animal in swimming!
Drawing on these facts, we reconstructed Leaellynasaura as a rotund furball that scurried peacefully about in the polar forests of Australia's past. We imagined its long tail as a thin, signalling "flagpole" that helped it identify and keep close to members of its herd. No doubt some people will find this reconstruction preposterous, and perhaps they will be right. However, we felt that not enough dinosaurs were reconstructed as "cute" beasts, whereas in nature, polar animals can look quite pulchritudinous under layers of fat, muscle, fur and other insulation.
Later on in the book is a section entitled All Todays which, to really drive the points home about how little we understand about how dinosaurs may have looked, tries to imagine how future paleo-artists might interpret creatures who exist today based on the same errors we've made.
For example, going with the theme of how fat doesn't fossilize, someone from the future might make this sort of reconstruction of a common modern animal:
Alternatively, perhaps swans could be reconstructed as preadory wingless monsters.
And for the faults of assuming all dinosaurs were scaly in the past, it could be equally dangerous to assume that now that we've discovered some with fur or feathers that we should extrapolate to all dinosaurs.
Such extrapolations could lead to fallacious assumptions, like how a future paleontologist might assume that because rats had fur, the same must be true for iguanas.
There are so many more examples in this book that I would love to share and discuss because it's just fantastic.
But I have to end this post at some point.
So let me just bring this back to the main point. Which is that we know very little. The more you learn, the more you realize how little we actually know for certain.
Certainty of science is often a lie.
As true as this is about paleontology, it's true of a lot of other fields too. It's true of psychology, of history, of neuroscience, of biology, of astronomy. While there is a lot that we do know, there's a lot more that just ends up being our best guesses.
It's okay to accept that we still have so much more to learn about the world around us.
This is something that should be embraced.
There is safety in the comfort of the lie of certainty. But it is a lie. It's a cozy blanket that was weaved around us when we were children and learning about the world, convincing us that we had all the answers when we don't by covering our heads to the larger world outside the blanket.
And while pulling off that blanket and realizing that we don't know everything is scary, we NEED to pull it off to be able to acknowledge that we have room to learn and grow.
We need to be able to proudly say, "I don't know, and that's okay because it means I have more to learn!"
So please keep learning and keep questioning everything!
