The statements and depictions are given as facts when they are nothing more than very highly speculative guesses with very, very little data to support them.
There is no chance of getting you to accept that there is more than very little data to support the guesses.
However, it raises an interesting point. Throughout time-things held to be scientific truths have been overturned by later generations, this has happened so often that anybody with a modicum of education has been exposed to this idea several times over. When something is presented as 'fact' by some people, it should be clear to the student that science is continuously being updated.
You are really asking that the tentativity of science be underscored as part of education. I agree.
With only one skull, very little should have been presented on this animal. There was not enough evidence to even venture a good guess as to whether it was aquatic.
Except of course, the evidence presented in this thread which discusses all the evidence available for making a good guess (eye positions, inferred diet, location of fossils, and its obvious similarity to an approximately contempory creature which was aquatic leads to the idea that this creature was at least semi-aquatic). If you want to, you can address this evidence.
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