Speculative Paleontology

When you're trying to imagine a prehistoric animal, your speculations and thoughts can be clouded by what has already been said. Something is repeated so often and seen so often, that it eventually just becomes the norm, and assumed to be the truth. Nothing is moved forward, and the concept stagnates, until you end up with a creature that went out of date centuries ago. Examples? Take your pick, there's plenty of them! Plesiosaurs being shrink wrapped snakes with necks as thin and flexible as a rubber hose. Baryonyx spending most of its life sitting beside a river waiting for a fish to skewer on its claw. Dromaeosaurids being exclusively pack hunters, when there's no reason that a fast-moving predator with a 9 cm long claw couldn't hunt for itself. I could go on. (I hasten to add here that I'm not picking on these in particular, I'm just using examples to make my point. Although I do have my problems with all three of these, but that's for another time.)
When trying to reconstruct an extinct animal, it makes perfect sense that you would look at other images, and then you would do the same, trying to be scientifically accurate - but accuracy isn't neccesarily being one of the crowd. In fact, I would say that being accurate in paleontology is very hard to do, but we can achieve a certain level of accuracy. But anyway, that's not my point. My point is creative stagnation, an inability to think out of the box, simply because it hasn't been done yet. If nobody stands up and complete rethinks something, nothing will ever move on. Plesiosaurs will remain shrink wrapped snakes. Baryonyx will be forever pretending to be a grizzly bear full time. Dromaeosaurids will be doomed to never hunt alone.
In some cases, this has been taken to the extreme. Allow me to use an example already stated: shrink wrapped plesiosaurs.

This is a well known piece of art first painted in 1830 - that's early Victorian times. You can see the plesiosaurs in his are shrink wrapped, with snake-like, disturbingly thin necks. Fast forward to the 21 Century, and you can still see these snake monsters depicted. Surely it would make sense to put some flesh on it's practically bare bones?

My point is, in palaeontology things quickly become unquestioned and fact, used again and again in paleoart. Out of the box thinking and speculation comes to a grinding halt, and we get conceptual stagnation.

To avoid this we sometimes need to completely rethink something. Create a new image, refresh the old concept that has been rotting for centuries. This sometimes means being a bit crazy with your ideas, experimenting . . .

What I'm getting at is, don't be afraid to try something crazy. Being conservative and doing what everybody else does isn't really going to get you anywhere - use your imagination, do some research, and come up with some new ideas, and suddenly a whole new world of paleontology is opened up. Really speculative reconstructions and thoughts on prehistoric creatures are things that I really encourage. I personally don't think sauropods were covered in some kind of fur-like integument. Does that make it a bad thing to think about this, speculate on it, reconstruct it as such? Paleontology is a guessing game, a fossil is a riddle - in a way, there are no right or wrong answers. There are so many possibilities, some of them undoubtedy a lot stranger than people might suspect, all of which are possible - it's part of what makes the subject so interesting to me.

What I aim to do is to start from scratch with different prehistoric creatures. Forget about the theories and the arguments, but focus on what I can find out, and what that tells me. Rethink an entire animal. Sometimes the results will not be so very different from the regular ideas, perhaps occaisonally I will create something quite strange and different. These exercises are fun to do, and the results are sometimes startling.

The creature that I've chosen to first take a look at is the notorious, infamous Tyrannosaurus rex. We'll have to wait and see what I come up with . . .

Bye for now.