Reminds me of an XKCD strip about spiders. A time traveler comes to the present to see a live spider since they only had remains to look at. They're astounded that spiders can make webs.

This honestly reframed dinosaurs for me forever. Science is extremely conservative with its interpretation, but the reality is that we only know very basic details. Millions of years is a long time to develop some really strange physiology.

[–] spooksboots 12 points 1 year ago

Said xkcd

[–] TurtleJoe 5 points 1 year ago

Your overall point is super valid. Sort of a, "We don't know what we don't know."

However, I think that at this point, scientists have gotten good enough at analyzing skeletons of animals to pretty accurately predict musculature to know what ancient animals mostly were built like. The spider web stuff is things like skin texture, color, were there feathers, cartilaginous frills, etc. It seems like a few times a year I see an article about a feature like that being found in remains, and that's super cool.