palaeofail-explained:

xxxtictacion:

palaeofail-explained:

Sort of, yes. In many cases muscle is left off; real animals also have things like fat, thick skin, thick feathers/fur, and air sacs that fill in a lot of the space. For reference, here’s how big an owl’s skeleton is compared to the living creature:

However, partially out of an attempt to “show that they know the skeleton” and partially out of just not knowing better, people who reconstruct fossil animals don’t pay attention to this, and just stretch skin over the bones. Like this:

No real (living) animal would look like that! It has literally no muscle, no fat, no fuzz. It doesn’t have room for jaw muscles or a digestive tract, so it can’t eat; the air sacs that would’ve been in and around the skeleton are gone, so it can’t breathe; it has no muscles in its arm or shoulder, so it can’t fly. 

bats do look like this

and it would be safe to assume that pterodactyls didnt have fur considering it is believed that it was super hot back then 

hell the reason the owl looks like that is because its super cold where they live 

Good points! Scepticism is always good, and you shouldn’t take what you read at face value without questioning it.

If you took the fur off of a bat, you’d see that they actually have a lot of muscle.  If you look at hairless bats (and yes, that’s an actual species!) you can see just how muscular it actually it is!

Birds are the same way, and so it’s probably safe to say pterosaurs were too. There’s a difference between being lightweight and just not having any muscle, fat, or organs.

See the fused area of the back behind the shoulders and in front of the ribcage? That’s there the muscles anchored to connect to the wings. Wings are big and there’s a lot of air resistance to lift them up and down, so there’s gotta be a lot of muscle to do that - especially on such a large animal. You’ll see similar structures on bats and birds.

Bats also differ from pterosaurs in the way they breathe - bats breathe like we do, with lungs, but pterosaurs had extensive air sac systems, more like birds. Tied to this, giant pterosaurs also had extremely light hollow bones. They could thus afford to be a bit bulkier than bats.

There are multiple pterosaur fossils that show hairlike structures called “pycnofibres”. You can see them yourself, if you don’t believe me:

We don’t have any evidence of larger pterosaurs LACKING these, and there’s no reason to think that they did lack them. An animal that has such large surface area-to-volume ratio is going to have trouble with heat being lost to the environment. The heat of the mesozoic varied from time to time and from place to place, but it’s true that it was generally warmer; however, flying animals still experience greater body heat loss from wind. It’s the same reason old-timey fighter pilots wore big leather-and-fur coats, not t-shirts and shorts.

And don’t forget - lots of owls do live in hot, arid places, and they’re just as covered in fluff!

Hope this answered your questions!