ABSTRACT Humans have made visual representations of what they think dinosaurs looked like since before the term and concept of “dinosaur” were first published in 1842. Over the next 175 years, these images have varied widely. The current era of dinosaur paleobiology began in the late 1960s and emphasized scientific and artistic conceptions of dinosaurs as more active and diverse in their metabolism, ecology, and behavior than previously thought. Over the past 25 years in particular, the rise of computer-generated images and the discovery of spectacularly preserved fossils from the Early Cretaceous of China and elsewhere have further revolutionized our understanding of the biology and external appearance (especially integument) of dinosaurs. Yet despite these innovations, dinosaur paleoart is still fundamentally shaped by the same basic set of influences that affected previous, now-discarded, images. These include (1) the fossils; (2) debates about which modern animals are the best bases for uniformitarian comparison with extinct taxa; (3) extrapolation (i.e., how far can we go from the known to the unknown); (4) the enabling effects of new artistic techniques; and (5) the ever-present pressures of the marketplace.

ABSTRACT There are two fossil records: the physical fossil record , which consists of specimens, and the abstracted fossil record , which is made up of data derived from those specimens. Mseum collections are the conduit between these two fossil records. Over the past several decades, the abstracted fossil record has provided many important insights about the major features of life’s history, but it has relied mostly on limited types of data (primarily taxonomic occurrence data) derived from ultimately finite literature sources. In contrast, specimen collections and modern tools for digitizing information about them present an opportunity to transform paleobiology into a “big data” science. Digitally capturing non-traditional (e.g., paleoecological, taphonomic, geochemical, and morphological) data from millions of specimens in museum collections and then integrating them with other unique big data resources has the potential to lead to the most important paleontological discoveries of the twenty-first century. What we know about the past record relied heavily on museum collections—the cumulation of centuries of investigation of the fossil record. The sample of past biodiversity will accumulate only with continued exploration of the fossil record … and restudy of existing collections…. —J. Sepkoski (1992, p. 80)