If scientists were to confirm dinosaurs had syrinxes, it would open up a world of sonic possibilities. Dinosaurs singing a duet with themselves? (Clarke’s syrinx was an extremely rare discovery.) So it’s possible there are other even more ancient syrinxes out there, waiting to be unearthed. She hasn’t yet found concrete evidence of a huge dinosaur with a syrinx.īut because syrinxes are soft structures, finding evidence of them is difficult. Clarke has found a syrinx from 67 million years ago (about a million years before large dinosaurs went extinct), but this syrinx was from an ancient duck relative, not a huge dinosaur. The wood thrush, for example, does this, singing two notes at the same time.īut if birds are actually tiny dinosaurs, why consider crocodilian sounds at all? The issue is that scientists aren’t sure when syrinxes first appeared. “They can sing a duet with themselves,” says Habib. Also, unlike a larynx, a syrinx actually has two openings, so birds can produce multiple pitches at once. Clarke likes to joke, “Birds sing from the heart.”īecause a syrinx is located deep in the chest, it produces sound more efficiently, which is why small birds can make such loud noises. Most vertebrates make sounds using their larynx, a vocal organ located in the throat, but birds use a syrinx, a vocal organ located deep in the chest, next to the heart. So how can birds potentially teach us about what dinos sounded like? A clue: Birds have a unique vocal organ. “You can see the assembly of those structures that are in your roast chicken in the fossil record.” “I used to put a roast chicken on the docu-viewer in the classroom,” says Clarke. That honor goes to birds, the direct descendants of dinosaurs. Terrifying! Birds are even closer relatives to dinosaurs, so could dinosaurs have sung?Ĭrocodiles are a good starting point for imagining what dinosaurs might have sounded like, but they’re not dinosaurs’ closest relatives. If a human were sent back in time, they might have actually felt the sound in their legs or chest. Ear hairs are too small to vibrate as a result of this sound, but bigger parts of the body could have vibrated. So if dinosaurs did sound like an ultra-low-pitched crocodilian, a lot of their sounds could have been hard to hear. Just as infrared light is too long of a wavelength for a human to usually see, infrasound waves vibrate so slowly that it can be hard for a human to hear. “They’re shaking the pond, basically.”Īs the pitch drops further, it approaches the range known as infrasound. “They’ll rumble so powerfully that you see ripples all around them on the water,” says Habib of crocodilians. rexes are more like crocodilians, they probably would have made more of a low-pitched, closed-mouth rumble. If you watch Jurassic Park, you’ll see a T. One such related group is crocodilians (crocodiles, alligators, caimans), who share a common ancestor with dinosaurs that lived around 250 million years ago. If they share a common ancestor, they may have similar attributes as well, like how they make sound. Scientists can look to living relatives of dinosaurs to reconstruct their sounds. “We have to do the best we can,” Habib says, with the clues scientists have. In order to figure out what an actual dinosaur voice may have sounded like, scientists can look to dinosaur relatives that are still alive. But this chamber doesn’t tell us about the actual dinosaur voice that fed into it. Ducky from The Land Before Time), had a long chamber in its skull, which allowed scientists to estimate the general frequencies that could have resonated within its head. One dinosaur, called parasaurolophus (a.k.a. To start, the shapes of dinosaur skeletons do provide some hints. Figuring out what dinosaurs sounded like means understanding the world they lived in a bit better, and is a key to understanding how they behaved. Still, scientists think it’s an important question.
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