New Look at What Dinosaurs May Have Looked Like

Scientists have generally used artist drawings based on fossil skeletons to guess what dinosaurs may have looked like. Now scientists are using lasers to flesh out what these ancient beasts may have looked like. Keep one thing in mind, their laser images are based upon presupposed ideas of what the dinosaurs looked like to begin with, so do not count them as necessarily accurate.

The combination of dinosaurs and lasers may sound like the next blockbuster science fiction movie. But for paleontologists, the two together might mean finding hard evidence of what the prehistoric beasts actually looked like.

Dinosaur fossils are mostly bone because that’s what preserves best over millions of years, but the dinosaurs themselves were also flesh, blood, skin, and feathers when they lived. Now, scientists are pointing laser beams at fossils to flesh out our view of the long-extinct animals.

“This is a new way to actually see the dinosaur, besides the bone. If you want to see one, we can show you one,” says Thomas Kaye, who pioneered this technique for analyzing fossils.