Recent research is shedding a little more light on the sounds made by dinosaurs.

Researchers have collected evidence of the sounds of extinct creatures from what is believed to be the first fossilized larynx of an ankylosaurus (Pinacosaurus grangeri), an “armored” herbivore dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous and was discovered in 2005 in Mongolia.

As Junki Yoshida, a paleontologist at the Fukushima Museum, points out, the find surprised scientists because the body parts involved in the expression of animals, including the larynx, which are often made of cartilage, and in some animals are made of bones, they were not properly preserved in the form fossils for thousands of years.

In the context of understanding the sound that a dinosaur could make, dr. Yoshida and his team tested species that are evolutionarily related to ankylosaurs, including birds, as well as their closest cousin, the crocodile.

“They’re kind of brackets in the spectrum of sounds we’ve come to expect,” explains Victoria Arbor, a paleontologist at the Royal Victorian Museum of Canada who was not involved in the study.

The vocal repertoire of crocodiles includes grunts and hisses. “The assumption that dinosaurs make sounds similar to those of crocodiles is somewhat correct. This is the basic anatomy they will be working with. And then the birds developed these additional ways of making sounds, whereby they can change the sounds coming out of their throats with little differences,” she says.

On the other hand, birds and reptiles have much more varied ways of producing sounds, as they use the organs surrounding their trachea and lungs. Extinct, but also living relatives of crocodiles, the larynx is what makes the sound.

Fossil larynx anatomy

The researchers measured two parts of the larynx that they estimated supported the muscles involved in opening and reshaping the airways. In Ankylosaurus, both of these parts were bony. The team compared their proportions to the larynxes of dozens of birds and reptiles, including crocodiles, turtles and geckos.

One part, which formed the basis of the Ankylosaurus’s larynx, was very large compared to other animals, indicating that the dinosaur could open its windpipe wide and make loud sounds that could be heard far away, the doctor notes. Yoshida. Another part of the larynx changed shape, allowing it to change sounds. This, scientists explain in a study published a few days ago in the journal Communications Biology, could have allowed the ankylosaurus scream like birds.

People might assume that the bird sound means dinosaurs are chirping like meadowlarks. This is probably not true, but “they may have had a wider range of sounds than we would expect from ankylosaurs,” the doctor explains. Alcove.

“There is a possibility that they chirped and cooedcontinues d. Yoshida. But it’s still too early to know exactly what sounds dinosaurs might have made.

“There are still many questions about the evolution of dinosaur sounds,” says Julia Clark, a paleontologist at the University of Texas. And it ends. “Ankylosaurs are weird. This is the main message of the study.”

Source: New York Times.