Vitor Monteiro

For paleoartists (and the scientists who work with them), properly restoring the skeleton is merely the beginning of figuring out how a dinosaur looked in life, since muscles, tendons, and other soft tissues that make up the final shape of an animal can be quite different than the skeleton alone. This requires an extensive knowledge of comparative anatomy from living organisms, a technique which has become more formalized in recent years with the application of Extant Phylogenetic Bracketing (EPB), which leverages the work of phylogenetics (the science of who is related to whom) to test inferences about muscle origins and insertions, and other soft-tissue hypotheses. When we are really lucky these hypotheses can be tested directly, such as when we find extensive soft-tissue preservations of a fossil like the "mummified" hadrosaurs. For stem birds we have had an embarrassment of riches when it comes to their epidermal coverings (fur, feathers and other fluff), but their fuzziness has generally covered up any information that might have been preserved about the shape of the underlying soft-tissues, or about the non-feathered skin structures.