They don’t just look at the bone structure.

Science success story:

Aboriginal religions generally hold that long ago in the Dreaming times, the world was cold, there was less water, and the coast was further away. You used to be able to walk to many of the islands around the Australian coast, because there were land bridges.

White people generally assumed these stories were mythological fiction, because white people are often racist and intolerant. However, science eventually figured out that 10,000 years ago, there was an ice age. The polar ice caps were bigger, and the ocean was shallower. Those land bridges were found under the modern ocean through satellite imaging. Aboriginal religions were right, and science proved that these religious histories had been preserved and kept accurate for 10,000 years!

Science wins again!

They even know the colouration of a bunch of them, like this Sinosauropteryx:

But first somebody had to make a movie with the wrong data, making the whole field cool enough to get funding to found out they were wrong.

I'm not old enough to see naked bunnies 🫢

Look at those lil ‘staches! That’s the best thing I’ve seen all day

Is this a certain type of rabbit or is it normal to shave them while leaving a moustache?

What the animal's skeleton looks like. Or How the animal's skeleton looks.

And if the scientists tried hard enough, they could probably figure out the large ears, too -- the skull would have slightly stronger muscle attachment points and vasculature openings to support the larger ears ... although that still wouldn't really tell the scientists what shape the large ears were, though. So you might still get a very odd-looking bunny out of it.

No, it alerts me

Just to add context, there is a good book called All Yesterdays about how earlier assumptions of dinosaur appearances based on fossil records have been challenged over time by new evidence. A lot of the artists who have developed visual recreations of dinosaurs in the past were working under assumptions of what dinosaurs were supposed to look like. But skeletons alone aren't always the best reference to use to base appearance off of, because soft tissue (lost to time) can often contain the most iconic aspects of a species.

So just to riff on that idea, the book contains a section called "All Todays" in which artists take modern animal skeletons we are familiar with and recreate them as if they were dinosaurs. So you end up with these gaunt creatures that are missing distinct features like ears, noses, fur/features, and coloration.

I go back to All Tomorrows every now and then. It's weird.