“This post is a paleontological disaster” is my favorite sentence of all I’ve read in this month and today’s the 30th! 😂❤️
‘This post is a palaeontological disaster’ is a marvelous turn of phrase, and I intend to steal it for use at the first opportunity.
The funny part about this is…
We do know what some of them sounded like. (Well I forget which ones so, maybe they’re not Dino’s, but uh, yeah.) (also, big “maybe” attached. They took 3d scans of what they think are the vocal organs and ran air through a 3d printed version.)
That was an exaggerated bit in the Lost World movie, but vocalizations are mostly done with soft tissue, which isn’t fossilized.
They found a fossilized Anklyosaurus larynx, which is what I 3d printed.
I got the file from a chain of friends passing the STL along, and highly-scientifically printed it in TPU and ran some air through just for the fun of it.
It sounded like a squeaky fart and was worth about of laughter and jokes. My nephew may have been at the age of fart jokes and not knowing when they were dead.
well almost, we don’t know what they sounded like but we can make pretty decent educated guesses at what they probably sounded like in general.
For example parasaurolophus very definitely seems to have a resonating structure, like a trombone strapped to their face, so it’d be weird if they didn’t make some sort of trumpeting sounds.
Another big one is that dinosaurs generally didn’t have anything like a voicebox or whatever the thing is that birds use to make their calls, so we can be quite confident that most dinosaurs didn’t make any bird-like noises, and they wouldn’t have been able to do stuff like roar either.
Which leaves us with t.rex probably just having sounded somewhat like an alligator.
I just read in a podcast that studying the effects of Helium in our throats helped us understand better the acoustics of our throats, and from there we also gained some understanding into how other animals, including dinossaurs, sound like.
Maybe they spoke German but with other words for dinosaurs?
