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After pondering on this topic for a bit, I suspect there's two major, cultural and psychological causes for the toxicity in paleoart circles and the paleocommunity. The first one is the Dunning-Kruger effect driven by introduction to paleontology from a young age (i.e childhood)
Ergo, people are introduced to "dinosaurs" and paleontology from a young age. Their first taste of it is from very simplified explanations from books and sci-com websites so they assume the whole field operates on that level even when they're older. They get cocky.
It's worse when those same people discover peer-reviewed literature. The introduction to much more technical terminology probably makes them even cockier having added those to their vocab. Your average Carnivora forum user or "Dinosaur fan" from 2012-2015 falls into this category
I have come to notice that a lot of people think they can operate on the level of actual, publishing paleontologists just because they know anatomical nomenclature and basic cladistic taxonomy. Most of the flamewars around the feathers and lips discourse is prob from this.
Reading the literature is great but most of these people probably don't have the slightest idea behind the bioinformatic and statistical methodologies used in those papers, so they take them as facts at face-value rather than what they actually are : model representations of data
I've had several people, for example, cite Bell et al. 2017 as having claimed that there's only a 2% chance of tyrannosaurids having filaments. Except that statistic came from a very small sample size of skin, and the statistic interpreted things in a debatable binary way.
I've also seen people who think any new recently published phylogeny = more "correct" than anything before it. I wonder if those people know what bootstrap and jackknife values are, or character states or outgroup-sensitivity.
The second group I feel that's contributing to the supposed toxicity in a lot of the paleoart community is the young paleoartists, and this one is a lot simpler to explain. Artist circles are incredibly toxic already (just look at Tumblr and Twitter).
I suspect the same mentality that drives people to fight over Steven Universe fanart, cyberbully famous digital artists, fight over female anatomy etc. is just leaking into young paleoartists, and instead it manifests into fighting over lips, feathers and what have you
In other words, young artists have always been edgy and cocky and condescending no matter what the topic is, we're just seeing it within the paleocommunity because of the sort of cultural overlap that paleoart creates between art and science.
There is also the "awesomebro" crowd which I didn't mention (tribute videos, Carnivora flamewars, who would win in a fight etc etc) because they do not seem to significantly show up anymore, and most of that was rooted in - I'm gonna say it - toxic masculinity to begin with.
But yeah that's all I have to share as someone who found myself dead-smack in the middle of all 3 of these sociocultural circles at various points throughout my life.
