Every picture is a reconstruction
Nothing on this site was ever photographed alive or as it was. Every picture here is a reconstruction, and each one is labelled where it appears.
The paintings are AI-generated. Each one starts from a written description of what the evidence shows: the shape of the skeleton, the length of the teeth, the size compared with animals alive today, the layout of the land, the plants and climate of the time. Every painting is checked by eye against that description and against the page before it is published. Paintings that clearly contradict the evidence, such as the wrong number of horns or a continent in the wrong place, are rejected. Where a painting that stays differs from the evidence in a smaller way, the note on its page says so. They are made with an image model whose licence allows this use.
What is known and what is not
Bones show size and shape, but rarely skin, fur or colour. Under the facts at the top of every page, a short note headed About the pictures says what the pictures are based on and which parts are imagined. Coat colours, feather patterns, skin tones and the exact look of a face are usually guesses, and the notes say so. Where frozen remains, cave paintings or ancient DNA tell us more, as with the woolly mammoth, the note says that too.
Pictures of extinct human relatives are especially uncertain. Skulls show the shape of a head, but not the soft tissue of a face, the colour of skin or the amount of body hair. Most of these paintings therefore show places, tools, footprints or distant figures rather than faces, and the notes say where a figure goes beyond the bones.
Licence
The illustrations are published under CC BY-NC 4.0.
For teaching and study: use them. Copy them, print them, put them on slides and worksheets, crop and adapt them. You do not need to ask and you do not need to pay. Please keep the name unseeneons.com with them. Classroom teaching is covered here whether or not the school, college or university charges fees.
Commercial use is reserved. Selling the images, or including them in something that is sold, needs permission. Write to [email protected].
The text of the pages is not under a Creative Commons licence. It is protected by copyright: quote it with attribution, as you would any source, but do not republish whole pages.
Corrections
If a picture contradicts the evidence, or a note claims more than the sources support, write to [email protected] and it will be fixed.