In more recent decades we’ve learned to better interpret muscle structure from the bone structures the muscles would attach to, and how they’d move together. Then we can couple that with not only physics, but historical differences in things like atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration. (For example: How does it move air down that whole long neck to its lungs?)
A lot of updates have been made, but outdated info is still extremely prevalent. It’s also difficult to search for accurate depictions because there’s not a good way to distinguish between a science-based depiction and an artistic drawing.
If elephants weren’t around anymore to look at, we could potentially notice similarities with the tapir and extrapolate a trunk based on the shape of and connective area on the elephant’s skull. We’d have to guess at the specific properties of the trunk, but at least we’d know it was there and be able to support arguments for things like its size without them being pure guesswork.
Without a similar animal I don’t know how close we’d get. Maybe it would be a mystery that inspires wild speculation.
In more recent decades we’ve learned to better interpret muscle structure from the bone structures the muscles would attach to, and how they’d move together. Then we can couple that with not only physics, but historical differences in things like atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration. (For example: How does it move air down that whole long neck to its lungs?)
A lot of updates have been made, but outdated info is still extremely prevalent. It’s also difficult to search for accurate depictions because there’s not a good way to distinguish between a science-based depiction and an artistic drawing.
How do those techniques work starting from and elephant skull? Would they guess it had a trunk? Really big nose?
If elephants weren’t around anymore to look at, we could potentially notice similarities with the tapir and extrapolate a trunk based on the shape of and connective area on the elephant’s skull. We’d have to guess at the specific properties of the trunk, but at least we’d know it was there and be able to support arguments for things like its size without them being pure guesswork.
Without a similar animal I don’t know how close we’d get. Maybe it would be a mystery that inspires wild speculation.
I realized just now that I didn’t know how an anteater’s mug works, and, well…