Culture
This Voice Box May Change What We Know About Dinosaur Sounds
The voice box was found in the skeleton of a bird from the Late Cretaceous period just off the Antarctic Peninsula.
If you thought humanity’s oldest melody wound back the years—all 3500 years of them—spare a thought for the Vegavis iaai, an extinct bird whose syrinx (or the equivalent to what we call a voice-box in birds) has just been discovered to be 68 million years old. This is a big find for scientists, as it paves the way for working out just what dinosaurs actually sounded like. It suggests, at the very least, that avian dinosaurs might have honked in a similar way to geese. Julia Clarke, the lead scientist on the project, has previously found that based on the physiology of the dinosaur, it is extremely unlikely that they roared, but probably made cooing or bellowing sounds similar to crocodiles. This is bad news for kids of the future, who will probably have much lamer dinosaur noises to imitate while on the schoolyard.
Read More: Listen to the world’s oldest instrument
(Via Mental Floss)
