Photo credit: Mike B
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
If you ask any child,“What sounds did dinosaurs make?” he or she will almost invariably make a roar. But a new scientific report, covered in Japan’s The Asahi Shimbun and other news outlets, reports that dinosaurs may have made bird-like noises. A fossilized pinacosaurus unearthed by researchers from the American Museum of Natural History in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert in 2005 was analyzed by a team from Japan’s Fukushima Museum and Hokkaido University.
The team discovered a fossilized laryngeal bone and found that it was similar in shape to laryngeal bones in modern birds. The researchers propose that dinosaurs could make much more complicated sounds than the various grunts emitted by today’s reptiles.
Of course, no one really knows what sounds dinosaurs made. They ranged in size from small to gigantic, and dominated the planet for about 180 million years until being killed by a meteor impact about 66 million years ago, so just like today’s mammals, they probably made a wide variety of different sounds depending on species and size.
I hope some of them actually did roar.
