How Do We Know Dinosaurs Roared? Did Dinosaurs Chirp Like A Bird?

*Cretaceous - Меловой период в истории Земли. *Syrnix - голосовой орган птиц, у которых нет голосовых связок. *Chirp - чирикать, щебетать.

In films and television documentaries, dinosaurs often roar like lions. But in fact, there is no evidence to suggest that they made such noises. There is little fossil evidence of a dinosaur voice box.

For clues, scientists have turned to other animals, like birds, which are technically the only living dinosaurs. And buried in a rock from Antarctica, paleontologists have found a tantalizing clue, reported in a paper published in the journal Nature in 2016.

The existing evidence suggests dinosaurs didn’t roar, for a couple of reasons. First, a lion’s roar is made possible by the big cat’s vocal cords: folds of tissue in their throats. We also have vocal cords, as do many animals, but those of lions are fine-tuned to make loud and intense noises, and there’s no direct fossil evidence that dinosaurs had these same structures.

Second, dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, so it’s likely some made more bird-like noises. 2016 study argued that some dinosaurs made closedmouth vocalisations like the ‘booms’ ostriches make. Modern-day birds have a voice box, called a syrinx, that allows them to chirp.

A syrinx was recently found fossilised in a bird that lived in the Cretaceous, raising the possibility that some non-bird dinosaurs had syrinxes too.