• Question from:Perry Wheeler

Just dropped by after asking a question on the mammals forum, after seeing some of the people posting here thought that you may have an answer to something that has bugged me for a while....

What sort of noise did dinosaurs make?

Hollywood would like us to believe that, like all good monsters, they roared. Even the BBC in Walking with Dinosaurs had them shaking the ground every time they opened their mouths.

But surely we'd need soft tissue evidence to prove that? We could work back from birds or reptiles... maybe T-Rex crowed like a rooster (can't see that filling too many seats in the next Jurassic Park movie...).

Is there any real evidence based on skull or neck structure?

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  • South London
  • Posts: 527

Perry,

Good question and one that many people have addressed over the years. As you correctly say, for many we would require some soft tissue. For others, there is ample evidence within the fossils to have a good guess at the sounds they could have made. For still others, comparisons with crocodilians (a basal group) may be relevant (crocs make all kinds of sounds).

Probably the best example we have of skull morphology to influence sounds is a critter called Parasaurolophus (a large dinosaur of the so called ‘duck-billed dinosaurs’, the Hadrosauridae). In the early 1980’s, after much speculation about the function of this spectacular crest (a weapon, a snorkel etc.), it was speculated that as they were hollow and linked to the nasal nares, they may serve to assist in enhancing vocalisations and thus mate recognition and / or intraspecific display. Casts of various crested Hadrosaurids (the Lambeosaurinae) were replicated (with papier mache or something) and then blown through by the experimenters, enhancing sound and influencing tone, depending on the size and shape of the crest and the complexity of the hollow tubes within. So, by demonstrating the hypothesis as more probable than the others, this is the best explanation we have for the size and variety of crests. Modern interpretations have the crests often brightly coloured or joined to the body with flaps of skin, all to assist in mate recognition, competition etc. I’m sure some of the dino researchers out there may have more up-to-date information…

Hope this helps,

Dave.

Last edited by Dave Warburton (27th Nov 2007 10:26:06)

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  • Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China
  • Posts: 237

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, the educators at the Harvard Museum of Natural History had a U-shaped piece of plastic tubing that purported to be an approximation of the air passage in the crest of Parasaurolophus. When blown into vigorously (a musician in a public outreach class I was teaching called it a "lip burst"), the tube would produce a sort of loud, high-pitched honking sound.

It's worth adding that, in some crested hadrosaurs, much of the interior of the crest consists of solid bone rather than air passages. This implies that the size and shape of the crest was not always limited to what was necessary to enclose the internal tubing. Presumably the crests did indeed have some sort of visual display function, along with their role as elaborate noise-makers.

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  • School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
  • Posts: 306

As far as I know, there are no fossil evidences to prove that dinosaurs vocalised.

However, modern relatives of dinosaurs, crocs  and birds both make some sort of vocal sounds. Crocodilians vocalise for a number of 'possible' reasons, ranging from territoriality to distress calls.
I found some croc calls here:
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/cnhc/croccomm.html

And we all know birds can produce very sophisticated vocal sounds through their syrinx, the vocal organ in birds. The syrinx sits in the region of the trachea just above the bifurcation into the lungs.

So we can safely assume that dinosaurs were capable of making similar sounds. As to what they may have sounded like, nobody knows.