About Bonebed

Bonebed is a reference shelf for prehistoric life. Each entry covers one genus: when it lived, how large it grew, where its fossils were found, who described it and when, what the current scientific argument about it is, and which popular claims about it are wrong.

What is on a plate

Every entry carries a generated bone plate rather than a photograph. The plates are vector drawings assembled from a per-clade library of skull, vertebral and limb shapes, scaled to the animal's published body length and laid over a stratigraphic background in the colour of its period. We draw them ourselves because the licensing status of most fossil photography is genuinely unclear, and because a drawing can annotate the feature that matters for that genus.

How the numbers are chosen

Body mass estimates for extinct animals are ranges, not measurements. Where a genus has several widely cited estimates we give the low and high end of the range that appears in the peer-reviewed literature, and we say which dimension the estimate is anchored to -- femur circumference, humerus length, or a volumetric model of the torso. Where a figure is contested, the debate field on the entry says so rather than quietly picking a winner.

Editorial policy

Entries are written from primary descriptions and from review papers, not from documentaries. Every entry lists the year and author of the original description. When a claim is a hypothesis rather than a consensus, the entry labels it as one. Corrections are welcome at [email protected]; if we get something wrong we change the entry and note the change date.

Published 2026-09-18