The challenge was to simulate the sounds of the environment of some 65 million years ago, complete with the voice of a dinosaur. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Bernie Krause is a sound recordist and bioacoustician.
“The sounds you’re hearing on the tape represent a complete composite of dinosaur habitat. And we’ve reconstructed that from the known fossil records of dinosaur habitats and also what we know about what these habitats might have looked like.”
To find out where a dinasaur’s voice might have fit into this ancient soundscape, Krause turned to idea he’s developed called the ‘niche hypothesis.’
“The niche hypothesis speculates that creatures need to be heard when they’re vocalizing and so they learn to vocalize in such a way in relationship to one another, where they don’t step on each other’s voices. And this animal orchestra is created over time where animals learn to vocalize in ways in which their voices are not masked or stepped on.”
Krause wondered if a dinosaur’s voice might have filled the apparently unoccupied vocal niche on the lower end of the frequency spectrum. So to simulate the vocalization of an extinct duck-billed dinosaur, he slowed down the calls of a Rhinoceros Hornbill.
“A Rhinoceros Horn Bill is a bird that lives in the tropical rainforest. It has a crest that’s similar to the duck billed dinosaur and it is thought that it uses that crest as an acoustical resonator to create sounds. So we used that sound to try to find out what the dinosaurs might have sounded like.”
Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.