Inverse has an interesting story about an effort to recreate models that show what dinosaurs really looked like.  The effort is a combination of paleontology and paleoart.  The work is based on a special fossil of Psittacosarurs discovered in China decades ago.  That specimen had very fine preservation, included preserved soft tissues like skin and feathers along with the bones.

Robert Nicholls, a paleontologist from Bristol, England, was in the process of creating the world’s most realistic model dinosaur when he realized it was absolutely adorable.

It was, in fact, perhaps too adorable. The creature had been dead for over 100 million years, killed by some gruesome cause lost to time. Cute wasn’t exactly the vibe he was going for.

Working alongside Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, Nicholls had spent months rebuilding an exact replica of a Psittacosaurus — a plant-eating, beaked dinosaur about the size of a labrador.

Nicholls had constructed the dinosaur “from the inside out,” as he tells Inverse, but there were no signs of impending cuteness until he readied the dinosaur’s cheeks. (He and Vinther knew the dinosaur had cheeks due to pigmented skin in that region on the fossil the model is based on.) As he applied his clay, the dinosaur started to look suspiciously chubby.

“There was debate about whether we should keep it looking cute,” Nicholls says.

“I was like, there are cute animals in the world. We shouldn’t pander to the idea that historic animals or dinosaurs are all monsters. They weren’t. They were complex.”

The finished 3D model of this Psittacosaurus isn’t adorable because the team was tickled by the idea of a cute dinosaur. It’s cute because of the facts. The model was created using a unique blend of artistic and scientific expertise that took an extremely well-preserved fossil and rendered it in three dimensions. Vinther provided the science, and Nicholls adapted those findings using an artist’s eye.

The result was something neither could have predicted: a chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed dinosaur that, even today, is probably the most accurate rendering of a dinosaur in the world. For short, they call him Pudgy.