People fail to distinguish between popular science and actual science. Popular science is mostly about communicating recent discoveries to the general public, preferably in some entertaining way. Actual science as it’s communicated is really hard for the general public to understand.

Just because popular science often gets it wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that actual science has gotten it wrong.

Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won't print a "We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur", but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it's truthful or just purely made up.

Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.

That's why the fake "chocolate helps you loose weight" study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn't expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)

Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there's a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.

Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.

Remember the "chocolate helps you lose weight" study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher's name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.

Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn't expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.

Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.

Yeah, that's my source, thanks for googleing that.

I'm not educated enough in the field to come up with a critique like that on my own ;)