Your overall point is super valid. Sort of a, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
However, I think that at this point, scientists have gotten good enough at analyzing skeletons of animals to pretty accurately predict musculature to know what ancient animals mostly were built like. The spider web stuff is things like skin texture, color, were there feathers, cartilaginous frills, etc. It seems like a few times a year I see an article about a feature like that being found in remains, and that’s super cool.
Your overall point is super valid. Sort of a, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
However, I think that at this point, scientists have gotten good enough at analyzing skeletons of animals to pretty accurately predict musculature to know what ancient animals mostly were built like. The spider web stuff is things like skin texture, color, were there feathers, cartilaginous frills, etc. It seems like a few times a year I see an article about a feature like that being found in remains, and that’s super cool.