There's a website (can't be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It's ridiculous.

That's why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.

Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.

At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.