This was a fun little thought experiment illustrating an inevitable flaw of paleoart: you have to use living animals for references, and you have to make a lot of assumptions for recognizable things like nose shape, ear shape, eye color, fur color and texture and so on, so there’s a lot of latitude for error, especially for creatures that don’t have any modern descendants.
On the left is a cougar (Puma concolor) restored by an artist who lives in a world where all felines and their relatives have gone extinct before humans ever saw them, so they used a wolf as the model for restoring soft tissue. On the right is the opposite situation, a wolf (Canis lupus) restored using felines as a model.
It was interesting to see how much of the character of the animal was inherent in the bone structure, and how much was dependent on flesh and fur.
honestesiologist 