https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/the-making-of-an-allosaurus-graveyard/
this gets into some deep paleoecology studies that *fascinate* me. it's not enough just to dig up and study what amounts to the "charismatic megafauna" of a given time/place... how much sense would it make trying to reconstruct a modern African Savannah ecosystem by only studying lions and wildebeest?
you have to look at all the other things--jackals, crows, dung beetles, gazelles, alligators, fish, plants, even microbes. it all *fits together*. and any given fossil record is by nature woefully incomplete.
that's why (getting into some woo-woo background story, lol) my job was using the equivalent of a scanning electron microscope to catalog and count microbes in Martian fossil sediments. we were trying to recreate the *entire ecosystem*, and knowing the chemical balances and bacterial percentages was vital to recreating it properly, rather than just sticking the charismatic megafauna in and faking the rest.
but then, we had the near-godlike computer processing and information storage technology to make a project like that viable; I don't think humans could do even the mapping of something like that right now, although they're getting very close. also, we had a much stronger societal framework of information preservation at all costs.
@green I think it's perfectly understandable!
Perhaps a bit cynically, I might note that anyone who unironically uses the phrase "good old days" is homesick for a fiction made up of positive memories of questionable accuracy. At least we know where we stand, aye?
... is it weird to be homesick for a possibly fictional headcanon construct world? among this crowd, I suspect very much not...