What modern animals reconstructed like dinosaurs look like

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals [2012] by Darren Naish, CM Kosemen, John Conway & Scott Hartman
[source]

Trying to figure out what prehistoric creatures looked like is rather tricky when all you’ve got to go on are millions-of-years-old fossils of bones and the occasional skin or feather print in ancient mud. So paleoartists look to modern animals – particularly reptiles like crocodiles in the case of dinosaurs – as references for determining those features that skeletons alone can’t reveal, such as skin texture and the distribution of soft tissues. But of course, this can only give us educated guesses that may well be entirely wrong.

To illustrate (pun totally not intended) just how wrong we might be, artists CM Kosemen and John Conway teamed up with paleozoologist Darren Naish to show us what modern, living animals might look like if we applied the same logic and assumptions to their skeletons that we use with dinosaurs. The results are equal parts spectacular and creepy as hell.

Baboons, for instance, turn into a cross between a thylacine and a viperwolf from Avatar:

The blubbery hippo, meanwhile, turns into a Tyrannosaurian hellbeast:

There’s more over at Atlas Obscura, which gets them all from Kosemen, Conway and Naish’s 2012 book, All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals.

Now we really need a time machine, if only to verify that the mighty T. rex didn’t look like a river-waddler or something.

(via Pharyngula)