Aren't the Images of the Prehistoric Past Works of Imaginative Fiction?

"These are parts of physical reality that are not independent of our consciousness, but shaped by it," he says. Owen Barfield pointed out almost a century ago for essentially the same reasons I've decided that all those images of dinosaurs lumbering around in vaguely tropical jungles are works of imaginative fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien was not digging for evidence in the physical world when he dreamed up smog the dragon or gothmog the bowel wrong. But there's a real difference between fiction unconstrained by reality, the free flight of the imagination, versus interpretations which are not perfect representations of reality, but which are constrained by the evidence.