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.
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.
... is it weird to be homesick for a possibly fictional headcanon construct world? among this crowd, I suspect very much not...
@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?
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.