Is it possible that Steven Spielberg has been lying to us this whole time? That’s what new research from UT Austin suggests. Based on a new finding via CBC News by paleontologist Julia Clarke, who discovered a sirynx in a prehistoric bird that was alive while the T-Rex sat perched atop the dino throne, dinosaurs probably sounded a lot more like ducks than they did the menacing beasts depicted by any movie ever made about dinosaurs.
A sirynx is different than a larynx, which is what us humans use to tell each one other that we’d like to see other people. Clarke expanded on that difference, noting that our voice box “is made up of cartilaginous support structures from which there are super-squishy soft tissues, what we call vocal folds, that vibrate and produce sound." She adds that while birds technically have “the same thing,” as us humans, their voice box is located “deep in the chest where the windpipe branches into two tubes, if you will, that go to the right and left lung."
Based on her discovery Clarke concluded that “roaring is biologically implausible for dinosaurs," and that while they weren’t silent, the sounds they made were most closely related to that of the modern day bird or crocodile. Does this mean we can expect a total re-imagining of Colin Trevorrow’s upcoming Jurassic World sequel, in which Chris Pratt dodges giant dinosaurs that sound like Daffy Duck? Sign us up.
