Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn't an "edutainment" game, but your submissions to Blathers' museum do carry a lot of real educational value. Both in the owl curator's explanation and the museum placards, you can learn a lot of interesting details on the donated fish, bugs, and dinosaur fossils. But science can be tricky, and a new dinosaur discovery has rendered one of the Animal Crossing fossils outdated. As reported by Science News, archeologists recently found the most complete tail bone of a spinosaurus ever recovered. And it shows that the spinosaurus tail was actually much wider than previously believed, making the dinosaur an excellent swimmer comparable to a crocodile.
Amused Animal Crossing fans quickly noticed this doesn't match up with the spinosaurus fossil found in the game, with its distinctly un-paddle-like tail.
It's hard to blame Nintendo. After all, science is a moving target, especially when it comes to piecing together pieces of the historical record through fossils. Our perceptions of plenty of dinosaurs have changed over the years, perhaps most famously when we learned that the brontosaurus didn't even exist. Still, it's surprising for one of the depictions to become inaccurate after only a month.
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