#palaeoart on wiki just reminded me to respond to this: NO.

NO #paleoart is better than art that disregards basic anatomy, known proportions, & published science (most of the paleoart on wiki). Wildly imprecise paleoart leads to misconceptions.

JUST SHOW THE DAMN #FOSSILS https://twitter.com/ornithopsis/status/1291410514342481930

Amateur artists should by all means draw all the fun wonky cartoonish paleoart of obscure prehistoric animals they want, & have fun open discussions about them online. They shouldn't however make the call as to whether their art is featured on the world's most-used encyclopedia.

If someone that is an expert on a given group of animals says "hey that's a pretty darn good reconstruction", then that expert should be encouraged to add it to the wiki library, or at least sign off publicly on that action.

But it should not be up to us artists.

You can ask any of my scientist collaborators: I rely on them to keep me from going completely off the rails with speculative reconstructions, and I attempt to cater the final product to their insights & taste.

Without that back & forth even professional paleoaritsts make mistakes & also start to come up with all kinds of tenuous hypotheses (which some then blog about as though they have special insight on groups of animals they've never studied or even worked closely w/ researchers on)

So again, I encourage scientists who have funded quality art for papers and press releases to reach out to both their artists and wiki editors & get their more credible art on wiki. There are LOTS of examples of really great art published CC-BY in scientific lit NOT on wiki.