I'd rather ... just ... sing ....

December 19, 2016 10:12 PM

Analysis of fossilized Antarctic bird's 'voice box' suggests dinosaurs couldn't sing. Which is to to say:

The discovery of the Mesozoic Era vocal organ (Nature, paywalled) -- called a syrinx -- and its apparent absence in non-avian dinosaur fossils of the same age indicates that the organ may have originated late in the evolution of birds, and that other dinosaurs may not have been able to make noises similar to the bird calls we hear today.

Dinosaurs didn't quack or cluck, but may have sounded more like an ostrich (more samples).

A bit more on the oldest bird voice box ever found from the New York Times.

We might know what a Parasaurolophus sounded like thanks to work by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

[Hey! (previously)]

posted by filthy light thief (10 comments total)

OMG that is so cool. The thing is, birds are weird for not having a larynx--mammals have them, yes, but so do amphibians and even other archosaurs like crocodiles and alligators (birds' closest living relatives). I'm not actually sure we have any idea why the hell birds/dinosaurs lost the larynx without looking it up too hard, and I study vocalization for a living and have read a lot of larynx papers. (I was going to study the structure of the larynx between my own study species and non-loudly-vocalizing rodents at one point... Well, anyway.)

So if the syrinx (well, syringes; birds have two, they actually sit lower on the trachea after the split between the lungs) - - if the syrinx evolved so much later after the larynx was lost, then we have to wonder why the hell you have so much time with dinosaurs, a massively diverse class, handicapping the crap out of their ability to make noise.

I mean, fish are really the only other clade I can think of without larynges and partly that's because most fish are shit at hearing, they have to use tuned swim bladders to catch changes in pressure and--right, birds are kind of crap at hearing compared to mammals too unless you're like, an owl that specializes in that shit. Huh.

But there's at least one clade of fish that primarily vocalizes via farting (swear to Christ I am not making that up) and do you know what this means? Maybe there is a group of dinosaurs that did the same thing while forcing air through the trachea past custom built sphincters with flaps wasn't yet an option. Oh my God, that would be delightful although I have no idea how you'd study it from skeletal remains...
posted by sciatrix at 4:37 AM on December 20, 2016 [16 favorites]

Also, having now read the article: holy crap, I know Julia Clark. Not well, admittedly, and the last talk of hers I went to was on structural pigmentation in feathers and on how we could maybe tell what colors dinosaurs were. (There was also a good one about penguins, I remember that.) I had no idea she was studying vocalization now! I mean, I probably should have, but I guess now I think of it the other UT animal vocalization lab is a more natural collaboration pairing than we are, since mine does mammals pretty much exclusively. Also I've been shit at getting to seminar, so this is probably my punishment.

Anyway, she's always seemed pretty kickass and also really nice. I'm super happy for her!
posted by sciatrix at 5:07 AM on December 20, 2016

Maybe there is a group of dinosaurs that did the same thing while forcing air through the trachea past custom built sphincters with flaps wasn't yet an option.

Which would also solve the problem of how proto-birds made the leap from gliding to true flying: jet propulsion. I think you may be on to something here, sciatrix.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:13 AM on December 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

So if the syrinx (well, syringes; birds have two, they actually sit lower on the trachea after the split between the lungs) - - if the syrinx evolved so much later after the larynx was lost, then we have to wonder why the hell you have so much time with dinosaurs, a massively diverse class, handicapping the crap out of their ability to make noise.

I have no grounds to speak on this beyond what I read from the 1998 article titled Scientists Use Digital Paleontology to Produce Voice of Parasaurolophus Dinosaur, which reports that scientists from Sandia National Labs and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science worked together and scanned a Parasaurolophus skull fossil, then guessed to fill in some gaps, to simulate some options for what those dinosaurs might have sounded like:

Paleontologist Tom Williamson and computer scientist Carl Diegert had to use common sense and some imagination to reconstruct not only missing parts such as the beak and nostrils of the dinosaur, but also the soft tissues of the head and throat that were not fossilized.

Since it's uncertain whether the Parasaurolophus had vocal cords, a variation of sounds with and without vocal cords was simulated.

And here's another rendering of dinosaur sounds: "what it may have sounded like on a Late Cretaceous evening", which came from analyzing Leonardo, a mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur that was only about three or four years old when he died. It seems that a number of different dinosaurs are expected to have made low sounds.


But there's at least one clade of fish that primarily vocalizes via farting (swear to Christ I am not making that up) and do you know what this means? Maybe there is a group of dinosaurs that did the same thing while forcing air through the trachea past custom built sphincters with flaps wasn't yet an option. Oh my God, that would be delightful although I have no idea how you'd study it from skeletal remains...

Maybe talk with Marguerite Humeau, an artist who has made reconstructions of extinct creatures' vocal tracts, extrapolating from extant species and fossil remains (previously).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:16 AM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Could a T. rex still roar though?

Please don't take that away from me.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:59 AM on December 20, 2016

Of course they can. Have you ever seen a T. rex (or other large carnivorous dinosaur) animation where they didn't?

Also I'd pick the emu for representative dinosaur sounds, although I'm not sure hand-held devices can record the depth and richness of their voice.
posted by sneebler at 12:32 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

why the hell you have so much time with dinosaurs, a massively diverse class, handicapping the crap out of their ability to make noise

Well, only to make vocal noise. T-rex got by with playing the maracas like a motherfucker.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:06 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I feel like there's an unexplored ramification here for what it sounded like in the Temples of Syrinx.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 1:25 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hah was just netflixing today the episode of friends where phoebe and ross argue about whether dinosaurs bark or not....
posted by Tandem Affinity at 8:00 PM on December 20, 2016

And I was imagining a resonant, booming “bok-bok-bok”
posted by acb at 3:52 AM on December 21, 2016