It should be noted that there are some disagreements at the level of reconstructing skeletons and musculature, and that improvements and tweaks are frequently being made. We mostly agree on the positions of muscles, for example, but the sizes of some of the muscles involved are variable in living animals and there is sometimes no reliable way of determining their size in fossil animals. The real complication in reconstructing fossil animals is that there’s all the soft stuff that goes on top of the musculoskeletal system. Integument is the great unknown for many fossil animals; its preservation is rare and infrequent, and even when it’s preserved, it may be massively … Continue reading Darren Naish