But those old theories (the right term here is "hypotheses") should be treated the way they are treated, because their statements were proved to be wrong and unsubstantiated. My favorite example is the one about "semiaquatic sauropods". According to this hypothesis sauropods were aquatic because they were just too big for their reptilian musculature on overal skeleton anatomy to support their weight on land. And this was proven wrong in every way possible. It's not like the hypothesis originally said that "sauropods, like most living animals were able to swim, and some of them inhabited near shore and/or mangrove swamp environments, as showed by ichnofossil and sedimentological data". If it was originally formulated this way, then we really should not treat it in negative way. But, this is not the case with outdated hypotheses. Instead of proposing possible, yet not typical behavior, they simply made very wrong statements. Could sauropods swim or spend some time in water? Yes, we have a lot of evidence in support of this. Were they semiaquatic by default? Hell no! See the difference?
BTW, swimming sauropods are widely acknowledged by paleoartist, including non-professional one -
[link] (a shameless self promotion)