Common Dinosaur Mistakes
- you know the "bunny hands" pose everyone does to indicate t. rex? with the hands folded down, palms facing the chest? yeah. almost no dinosaurs could do that. it would break their wrists. only one unique group evolved to do that, which doesn't include any of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. the term for this is "pronation" and actually the vast majority of land vertebrates can't do it. mammals can. mammals are weird.
- not a single dinosaur has claws on their fourth or fifth fingers. not a single one. not even if they're quadrupedal.
- most dinosaurs have very stiff tails and can't wiggle them around like a lizard tail. the tails were stiff for balance.
- the "tongue flick" thing that lizards do is a lizard thing. dinosaurs wouldn't have done that. they don't do that today (birds, birds don't do that)
- "nonavian" dinosaurs with feathered wings had them like birds. they covered the hands. and attached to the hands. stop giving Velociraptor hands. it had wings. and very big ones, too, based on Zhenyuanlong.
- dinosaurs with scales don't have lizard scales. lizard scales are a derived trait found only in lizards. they had scutes similar to those of living birds, but much smaller compared to body size, and often in crazy shapes and patterns. dinosaur scales are super weird tbh
- sauropods don't have elephant feet. they handled the problem of size in a much weirder way: instead of spreading out the weight, they turned their feet into columns. like pillars. some of the biggest species didn't have any fingers, their front limbs just. end. for maximum column support.
- dinosaurs were chonky. you could not see the bones like a silhouette under the skin. some might have been skinnier and some of the features of the bones would be somewhat like with skinny bird legs, but most of the time? no. so stop making the holes in their skulls visible on the outside like damn. jurassic park/world is the biggest offender for this one.
- the whole unique feature of dinosaurs is having their legs DIRECTLY under their bodies. they do not sprawl. I can't believe I have to say that, but I do.
- hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) front feet were hooves. like, seriously, hooves. not little flippers. not three fingered hands. hooves.
I reserve the right to add more to this post as I think of things.
other people can too, but just research before you do.
