Paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" in the early 1840s to describe the lizard-like fossils he and others had been finding. He derived the word from the Ancient Greek words δεινός (deinós, which means "terrible") and σαῦρος (saûros, which means "lizard"). Thus the word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard".
Not long after research into dinosaurs began in earnest, artists started attempting to represent them in art. The early efforts, by artists such as Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Charles R. Knight, defined the public perception of dinosaurs for decades. But their depictions of dinosaurs were inaccurate in some ways, including showing the dinosaurs as sluggish and without feathers.
In the last few decades there has been a renaissance of paleoart. Artists such as John Sibbick, Julius Csotonyi, Phil Wilson, Mark Witton, Sergey Krasovskiy, etc. have tried to correct public perception of dinosaurs (and related organisms, like pterosaurs) by depicting them as active animals, sometimes with feathers. But modern artists still sometimes take liberties, such as choosing colors and patterns for the dinosaurs' skin and feathers or depicting behaviors that are only hypothetical, at best.
When I tried drawing dinosaurs with the Stable Diffusion AI, it made some mistakes, too. It added extra limbs, limbs in weird places, extra eyes, extra nostrils, tongues with teeth, tails that blended back into the body, etc. I cleaned things up where I could, but some just couldn't be fixed without destroying what was great about the original output from the AI. And given humanity's historical error rate in dinosaur art, who's to say that Stable Diffusion did all that poorly?
These illustrations were drawn using Stable Diffusion 1.5.
