It speaks to the clusterfuck that NMS became that this detailed blog post is written by a fan reverse-engineering the code/content, rather than someone from Hello Games doing a post-mortem on Gamasutra who can speak with more authority. I'm not knocking the author's attempt at reverse-engineering -- in fact, it's awesome on a geek level because reverse-engineering is an additional technical hoop to understanding a game's core. It's just that when a game has as much hype and sales as NMS does, usually the creators would be the ones to do a technical post about how clever they were.

But the mention of the diplodocus is just one example of how much of a clusterfuck NMS is: The diplodocus and other beautiful dinosaurs were part of the E3 demo that was presented to fans as NMS's procedural code in action. And, as the author notes, it doesn't appear to be something that actually was procedurally generated, but was hand-designed to make the E3 demo footage look good (and, to Hello Games's shame, they used this footage as the official advertising for NMS, even after release).

Here's one of the canonical parodies of the shady shit Hello Games pulled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

edit: grammar fixes