Over sixty five million years ago, a dinosaur named Parasaurilophis roamed North America. It had a duck shaped bill and a large crest on top of its head. Well, some sceintists think that it may have used this crest to produce sounds, and they’ve created a computer based simultion of what Parasaurilophis might have sounded like. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
“The crests are hollow, so the animal, when he inhales or exhales, he actually breathes through passages that pass through these big crests.”
Dr. Thomas Williamson is curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Working together with Carl Diegert of Sandia National Laboratories, he reasoned that since the dinosaur breathed through the crest, it might have functioned as a sound producing chamber.
“We built a computer model to show us what kinds of sounds this animal might have been able to make with this big crest that acts like a musical instrument on top of its head that the animal blows through. The skull is about five or six feet long. Because it’s so long, it makes very low frequency sounds. But the principle with which it might have made sounds is similar to the pan pipe, like if you blew over the top of a pop bottle. That may be how the dinosaur made the crest resonate, even if it didn’t have vocal organs. The sound that came out of it was very unexpected. It still sends shivers up my spine because it’s so unearthly sounding. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before.”
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.