#obligatory I'm not a paleontologist I just like prehistoric creatures and accurate science.

[bat-connoisseur]

The thing that bothers me the most about the whole 'feathered dinosaurs look stupid!' or 'not scary' debate is that... They were real animals. These were actual real animals.

They aren't movie monsters or fictional creatures who are conciously designed by someone, they were real and shaped by their environment. Natural and sexual selection 65 million years ago didn't care what some random human thought looked cool, it cared about what allowed a species to survive long enough to reproduce, and it's so annoying that people treat them otherwise. Paleoart and reproductions of what they looked like are (generally) aiming for realism. You don't flip over a rock and chastise a salamander for not looking cool enough. And you don't ignore scientific evidence because you think that dinosaurs look cooler featherless and shrinkwrapped.

I know it can be hard to picture them as real animals because their presence is usually limited to media, occupying a similar place in people's minds to dragons perhaps, and with fictionalised stories of extreme violence. As much as I liked Jurassic Park, the leveraging of dinosaurs as horror monsters puts them in a similar place to fictional characters, and people treat them as such.

I need to emphasise- Dinosaurs weren't conciously designed. Dinosaurs weren't conciously designed. And getting upset at more realistic representations of them because you preferred how innacurate depictions looked is wrong, fustrating, and shows a deep misunderstanding of what a dinosaur is. Accurate science isn't there to create a cool monster. It's there to approximate what real animals looked like before we existed.