Ross and co-authors suspect that pop culture is the culprit. Obviously the illustrations of precollege students involve a fair bit of imagination and artistic license – accuracy was not necessarily at the forefront of my mind when I scribbled dinosaurs in elementary art class – but why would university students taking a geology class be so far off the mark? rex have been stomping around movies and television documentaries for decades. rex at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science – reconstructions of the famous tyrant dinosaur in most of America’s major museums have been adjusted into more accurate poses, and modern T.

rex at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science the high-kicking T. Why should such a discrepancy exist? With the exception of a very few – such as the high-kicking T. rex is lagging a century behind the science.

In the minds of some students, at least, T. rex with a spinal angle of over 40°, with the college students being more likely to draw the dinosaur with the incorrect posture than precollege students. Within a sample of 111 Ithaca College undergraduates and 205 elementary to middle school students who visited the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, students most often drew T. Most of the drawings by the sampled students didn’t even come close to the current representations. Modern illustrations tend to depict the dinosaur with vertebral column held between 0 and 10° in respect to a flat surface. rex skeleton, published with the theropod’s initial description, the dinosaur’s spine sloped at an angle of 57°. Despite museum displays, carefully illustrated works of paleo art, and even blockbuster films, young students from elementary school to university envision the classic dinosaur in a pose that is strikingly similar to the reconstruction paleontologist William Diller Matthew drew over a century ago. That’s what paleontologists Robert Ross, Don Duggan-Haas, and Warren Allmon found when they asked students to do just that in an effort to see how public perception of dinosaurs matches up with scientific understanding.

College students are even more likely to make the same error.

rex, and they will probably depict the tyrant with a sloping back and drooping tail. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īsk an elementary school student to draw a T.

T rex line drawing simple