The word  "dinosaur", as we all know, comes from the Greek for "terrible lizard".  It stuck more or less because it sounds cool and conjures images of scaly, reptilian, otherworldly monsters. For many, if not most, those are still very much the associations with the term.

John Conway drew this Triceratops with speculative spikes. We dont know that the Triceratops was this spiky, but it could have been.

     It was first suggested that todays birds are dinosaurs in 1868, within a decade of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species. Even then, the bird-like features of dinosaur fossil skeletons were obvious. Today, its commonly accepted that birds are dinosaurs, and that dinosaurs never truly went extinct. Still, in the popular imagination, birds and dinosaurs dont look a thing alike.

Charles Knight (1874-1953) was famous for his dinosaur drawings, but the weak, reptilian legs he imagined would never have supported a Brontosaurus or a Diplodocus.

     Gregory Paul in the 1987 book, Dinosaurs Past and Present. The essay examined how much could be known, or at least inferred, from dinosaur skeletons — and the many ways which people doing dinosaur reconstructions were getting it completely wrong.

  Tyrannosaurus rex with Torosaurus latus in the snow, by John Conway.

     And so Paul drew feathered dinosaurs — especially small theropods in the lineage of the birds. Lo and behold, in the 1990s a trove of fossilized dinosaurs feathers was unearthed in China, and the discoveries continue to this day.

     The diversity of coverings now shown in the fossil record are even stranger and more flamboyant than what Paul predicted, including various sorts of hair-like filaments, fuzzy feathers, quilled feathers, and more.

     Truth is stranger than fiction — if you want to come close to the truth, you’d better bring your imagination.