Movies Jurassic Park and Jurassic World may have to be redone. Based on a recent study, dinosaurs, even the large ones, may have emitted coos, instead of beast-like roars.
In a paper published in Evolution, scientists raised the possibility that the sounds some birds make -- like coos and hoots -- might have their roots in the vocalization of their ancestors, the dinosaurs.
Co-author of the study Julia Clarke explained: “To make any kind of sense of what nonavian dinosaurs sounded like, we need to understand how living birds vocalize.”
“This makes for a very different Jurassic world. Not only were dinosaurs feathered, but they may have had bulging necks and made booming, closed-mouth sounds,” Clarke continued.
It's down to a little thing called closed-mouth vocalization, which is similar to the sound some birds produce while keeping their beaks shut and emitting the noise from their throat.
In a press release, the authors noted that the sound has much lower pitch than other open-mouth vocalizations, like a songbird's tune. Instead, it's more likely to be the sound of an ostrich.
“Looking at the distribution of closed-mouth vocalization in birds that are alive today could tell us how dinosaurs vocalized,” Chad Eliason from The University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences and a co-author of the paper said in a statement.
“Our results show that closed-mouth vocalization has evolved at least 16 times in archosaurs, a group that includes birds, dinosaurs and crocodiles. Interestingly, only animals with a relatively large body size (about the size of a dove or larger) use closed-mouth vocalization behavior.”
Photo: The Sun
Source: Popular Science | Time
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