A little thought experiment to illustrate an inevitable flaw in paleoart.

Imagine an alternate universe in which there are no felines. For whatever reason, they all died off before a human could see or draw a representation of one. And then a paleontologist digs up the complete, perfect skeleton of a puma, and a paleoartist is tasked with painting a life restoration. What is he going to do? With no close living relatives to reference, he uses the next best thing - another common predator, more distantly related, that lives in the same area and hunts similar prey. The result is on the left, a puma skull restored with details of the soft tissue and fur of a timber wolf.

On the right is the life restoration of an extinct animal from an alternate universe with the opposite situation. All members of the cat family are present and accounted for, but no one has ever seen a canid. Another artist is handed the the skull of a wolf to work with. Rather than simply grafting the colors of an extant animal onto her skull, she combines inspiration from a tiger, puma and cheetah to come up with pelt marked like a typical feline, reasoning that since most cats have brightly patterned coats, it's likely her mystery animal did too, although she can never know the exact array of spots and stripes.

It's interesting how much of the character of an animal is in the details, and how much an artist's choices can influence the way we picture a fossil animal.