What did dinosaurs sound like?

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Speaker 5 It's peak summer blockbuster season, so we wanted to share one of our favorite blockbuster-inspired episodes.

Speaker 8 It all started a couple years ago when our supervising producer Meredith Hodenott went to see the latest Jurassic Park sequel at a drive-in.

Speaker 11 And all the giant dinosaur roars were coming out of my car speakers, and I was like, how do they know what dinosaurs sounded like?

Speaker 11 We have an idea of what dinosaurs kind of look like from their fossils and from the skeletons or whatever, but how would we know what a dinosaur roar was?

Speaker 7 Yeah, so I've been looking into it and dating back to the first Jurassic Park movie, it turns out they really didn't know and they didn't really care that much.

Speaker 18 Jurassic Park wasn't really going for, you know, what dinosaurs actually sounded like, they were going for more of a feeling.

Speaker 8 So if you think about, you know, that iconic T-Rex sound, it was this huge roar.

Speaker 19 And it was actually made by combining a bunch of different animals.

Speaker 15 So, cool.

Speaker 19 The basic ones are sort of this low-pitched tiger sound

Speaker 23 combined with some other sounds, and actually, this baby elephant.

Speaker 20 And then, other roars through the movies have lions,

Speaker 25 some donkey screams, classic.

Speaker 20 They had some dolphin screeches.

Speaker 27 They actually have koala mating calls.

Speaker 11 Amazing.

Speaker 11 Oh my god. I feel like I have a new respect for koalas now.

Speaker 22 I mean, yeah.

Speaker 8 And all of these sounds come together to make that iconic roar.

Speaker 27 So most of the animals they used for these sounds were mammals.

Speaker 27 Which is kind of weird because dinosaurs are reptiles.

Speaker 11 Distinctly not mammals.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so the sound designer for Jurassic Park actually told this story about the scientist coming up to him and being like, I really don't think the dinosaurs would have sounded like this.

Speaker 5 He basically responded, it's a movie.

Speaker 11 Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one that had this question.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 16 The question is still open, right?

Speaker 25 If Jurassic Park was wrong,

Speaker 32 What's right?

Speaker 18 And that's what I want to tell you about on this week's show.

Speaker 33 I want to take on this wild sounding question of how do you even go about trying to reconstruct an ancient sound?

Speaker 5 And especially for our very specific purposes,

Speaker 25 what did dinosaurs sound like?

Speaker 11 Oh my god, I'm so ready for this journey with you. Let's go.
Let's do this. I'm so proud.

Speaker 33 All right, so before we get to figuring out how people go about reconstructing extinct sounds and what dinosaurs might have sounded like, I just want to set the scene, like how big of a problem this is.

Speaker 33 All right. Not only are dinosaurs gone, but the amount that we know about dinosaurs is just strikingly tiny.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 33 We've only found one individual dinosaur for every 10,000 years.

Speaker 25 And that's for a hundred million years of when dinosaurs were on the planet.

Speaker 34 Yeah.

Speaker 33 And because of that, like we're still discovering almost 50 new species of dinosaurs every single year, like today in 2022.

Speaker 27 Oh my God.

Speaker 33 There's so little we know even about how they look.

Speaker 16 Right. So then when you start thinking about how they sound, it's like even more ephemeral.

Speaker 34 It's a significantly harder question to answer.

Speaker 5 So in the face of all that, the first basic way to figure out an ancient sound like this is to just look at the actual stuff that made the sounds, like essentially looking for a fossilized roar.

Speaker 11 How could a roar be fossilized?

Speaker 5 So the parts of the body that make the roar, like looking for those things, right?

Speaker 11 The throat and like

Speaker 11 there's resonance and the hollow bones or something.

Speaker 5 All of those words. Some combination of all of those words.

Speaker 21 So I talked to this paleontologist slash forensic analyst michael habib but he told me that finding the equivalent of a fossilized roar is just absurdly difficult the primary challenge in reconstructing sound is that most of the sound producing structures are soft tissues or less resilient hard tissues it's muscle and cartilage and those tend not to fossilize is there like any way that this stuff could get fossilized?

Speaker 11 Like, how could you get this information?

Speaker 30 There's actually one really interesting example that shows just how lucky you need to be.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 8 This isn't dinosaurs, but like 10 years ago, this group of scientists found the fossilized wing of this 165 million year old sort of cricket relative.

Speaker 32 And wings are the actual things that make the sound for this cricket.

Speaker 41 So the scientists were able to just figure out exactly how the wings were shaped, compare compare them to living crickets, and then just reconstruct what this super ancient cricket sounded like.

Speaker 11 I mean, like going back to the Jurassic Park metaphor, like this, this is the mosquito in the amber, right?

Speaker 8 This is almost exactly because this is a cricket.

Speaker 21 It's equivalent to finding the vocal cords preserved.

Speaker 36 Do you want to hear the sound?

Speaker 22 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 8 So this is,

Speaker 18 I don't want to say for sure, but this might be the oldest sound of a living thing ever reconstructed.

Speaker 11 It's so familiar and yet so like different at the same time.

Speaker 5 But this is like a cricket sound.

Speaker 25 Like it's kind of a far cry from

Speaker 27 a dinosaur sound, a far roar from a dinosaur sound.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 11 So is there anything that's like in exoskeleton but for dinosaurs?

Speaker 27 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 So this is the sort of the big question, right?

Speaker 37 Like if you can reconstruct an ancient cricket sound, can you do the same thing for a dinosaur?

Speaker 42 And you sort of can.

Speaker 21 Oh, sort of. Okay.
So, one of the most famous examples where we have a pretty good idea of the sound range that was made by a dinosaur is this duck-billed dinosaur called Parasaurolophus.

Speaker 11 Parasaurolophus. All right.

Speaker 25 Parasauilophus.

Speaker 25 You've actually probably seen it.

Speaker 11 What Land Before Time character is it?

Speaker 5 It's actually Ducky.

Speaker 11 I know Ducky.

Speaker 9 We go way back.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's like that dinosaur that has a skull-shaped, like slick back hair or sort of like ponytail.

Speaker 11 The pompadour situation.

Speaker 27 And it turns out that that, you know, pompadour is really, really

Speaker 37 important for shaping sound.

Speaker 25 So that thing on the parasaurolophus head is actually a tube.

Speaker 21 That is actually hollow on the inside and they connect to the nasal passages and essentially the airway for the animal.

Speaker 21 And so when it took deep breaths, it would be forcing air through that set of tubing.

Speaker 9 And the idea is that this hollow tube might actually be used to to shape the sound that the Parasaurolophus made.

Speaker 11 It's like a dinosaur megaphone.

Speaker 14 Yeah, or like the cone that a cheerleader shouts into.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 30 You know, it doesn't give us the actual voice that fed into the cone, but it does give us some interesting clues, like which frequencies resonate best.

Speaker 9 So scientists could actually make a sort of educated guess.

Speaker 10 It sounds kind of like a fog horn type thing.

Speaker 11 Or the vu vuzelas.

Speaker 19 Yeah, right. And then they were like, okay, let's check this a different way.

Speaker 8 Would the parasaurolophus have been able to hear this sound?

Speaker 21 And it does line up. The irosicles are the size and shape you would expect to hear that sound range.
It's like its sweet spot.

Speaker 11 Also makes sense that they're calling out to their buddies.

Speaker 25 Exactly.

Speaker 8 So we know which frequencies work best with the tube. We know which frequencies work best with the ear.

Speaker 33 So we can kind of get this sound, even though we don't really know the ultimate sound that was generated into it.

Speaker 11 Seems like a good guesstimate, though.

Speaker 5 It is a really creative guesstimate.

Speaker 8 And it was initially done by this guy, David Weisample, who is Michael's PhD supervisor.

Speaker 21 And that actually resulted in the staff of the original Jurassic Park film, the 1993 Jurassic Park, calling him for consultation on dinosaur sounds.

Speaker 21 Although they didn't like a lot of what he had to say.

Speaker 8 They liked some of what he had to say.

Speaker 21 They liked the Parasaurolophus thing, and actually you can hear the Parasaurilophus calls in the background of what is probably the most famous scene of that original film, which is where they're in the Jeep and they stand up and you get the like taking off the sunglasses, amazing look, and you can hear the Parasaulophus in the background.

Speaker 27 Welcome

Speaker 43 to Jurassic Park.

Speaker 16 You hear those kind of like fog horny things in the background?

Speaker 11 Yeah, totally. You can hear it like echoing off the misty mountainsides.

Speaker 5 So to Jurassic Park's credit, they did get the Parasaurilophus kind of right.

Speaker 18 Like we don't know for sure what the voice is that was feeding into that tube, but they did a pretty good job on that one.

Speaker 34 Right.

Speaker 8 On the other hand, there's another part of that same scene that's really not as good.

Speaker 18 So the first big dinosaur you see is a Brachiosaurus, you know, like the big one with the long neck.

Speaker 11 The giraffes of the dinosaur world.

Speaker 36 Classic dinosaur, right? Right.

Speaker 5 But they first see this Brachiosaurus.

Speaker 33 That's the first big dinosaur they encounter, and this is what it sounds like.

Speaker 21 The Brachiosaur itself is trumpeting like an elephant. And he had definitely advised them against that.

Speaker 17 David was like, I don't think Brachiosauruses would sound like that.

Speaker 21 The big long-necked dinosaurs probably didn't produce much sound. He said they could probably hiss.

Speaker 5 So real Brachiosauruses would probably just go...

Speaker 11 Wait, can you, can you, I missed that. Could you repeat that? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 So pretend I'm a Brachiosaurus.

Speaker 11 It's in my head. The Noamosaurus.
Shhh. One more time.

Speaker 9 It's just not the sound you'd expect from a dinosaur.

Speaker 11 Where would the hiss come from, though?

Speaker 18 So this is another sound that you can figure out by looking at actual fossils.

Speaker 5 And it all has to do with the neck.

Speaker 21 The primary nerves that run the vocal muscles and your larynx and your voice box run down your neck into your trunk and then back up your neck to get to the larynx.

Speaker 25 So it's twice the length of your neck.

Speaker 34 Okay. Super long.

Speaker 21 And we tend to think of nerves as being instantaneous, but they're not.

Speaker 15 It actually takes some time to send a message from the brain all the way down the neck and then back up to the vocal cords.

Speaker 21 And the thing you're trying to control only works if you can control it quickly.

Speaker 12 And if you're a brachiosaurus with this super long neck, you got a real problem.

Speaker 22 Right.

Speaker 8 There's no way they could control this elephant kind of voice.

Speaker 32 The best they could do was basically just push air out their mouths.

Speaker 9 And it's just sort of like, that's this moment of like, okay, we have these pictures of these enormous, majestic, epic dinosaurs.

Speaker 33 And it's just hard to imagine them going like,

Speaker 11 definitely not cinematic.

Speaker 5 Yeah, not exactly blockbuster style.

Speaker 8 And Michael's advisor, David, he knew all this science and, you know, he was talking to the Jurassic Park people over the phone.

Speaker 7 And this is the part they really didn't like.

Speaker 21 He told me the story.

Speaker 21 As soon as he said hiss, there was just dead silence at the end of the phone. They're like,

Speaker 21 really? Hiss.

Speaker 17 They were like, no, that's not how a Brachiosaurus sounds.

Speaker 11 You could hear the ancient crickets.

Speaker 18 I love imagining him on the phone just like hissing to Jurassic Park executives.

Speaker 11 I mean, like, okay, so we got the Bronchiosaurus. We got the Pompadour traffic cone situation.

Speaker 11 But I just, I need to know what the T-Rex sounded like. I need that roar, the visceral stuff.
There's got to be something more satisfying than just stomping up and then going,

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, ultimately, even though we have all these fossils, that core voice is sort of a black box.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Jurassic Park's answer to this black box is, let's just get some scary mammal roars.

Speaker 18 But there is another way to try and figure out what the actual dinosaur voice sounded like that's not just vibes.

Speaker 17 And people are doing this.

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 11 how are they doing that?

Speaker 17 I will tell you after the break.

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Speaker 22 Okay, Meredith, we're back.

Speaker 11 Noah.

Speaker 34 Dinosaur sounds.

Speaker 11 Dino sounds.

Speaker 35 So before the break, you know, we were trying to figure out ancient sounds by looking at fossilized structures.

Speaker 11 Yeah. Concrete things that we can like see and learn from.

Speaker 9 So like that parasaurolophus tube, the brachiosaurus neck.

Speaker 10 Totally.

Speaker 8 But like we said, neither of these tell us about that core voice, the actual thing that made the sound.

Speaker 5 But I talked to this guy whose job it is to create sounds from the ancient past.

Speaker 51 My name is Johnny Crew and I'm a sound designer.

Speaker 23 Conveniently, Johnny sound designs dinosaurs.

Speaker 11 Amazing job.

Speaker 22 Incredible job.

Speaker 11 What does his business card look like?

Speaker 16 His business card is just yippee.

Speaker 51 It's brilliant. I mean, you know, if I was able to go back and tell my six-year-old self what I'd be doing at this point in my life, you know, they'd be amazed, you know.

Speaker 51 I mean, who doesn't love dinosaurs?

Speaker 10 So Johnny's been working on this Apple TV Plus show, Prehistoric Planet, which has this super scientific approach.

Speaker 8 It's kind of the anti-Jurassic park. The scientific consultant that worked on the show basically came in and he was like, no roaring,

Speaker 51 no mammals. So initially it was a bit like, oh, right, okay.

Speaker 20 Because when Johnny made dinosaur sounds for other movies, he used a lot of mammal sounds.

Speaker 51 We couldn't rely on any of that stuff. We had to kind of start again from scratch.

Speaker 11 What does that mean? How do you start from scratch on a dinosaur sound that no one's ever heard?

Speaker 23 Basically, you can look at animals that are related to dinosaurs that are alive today and see how they make sounds.

Speaker 11 All right. Who's our dino cousin?

Speaker 18 So some cousins that they have, which are especially interesting for sound sound reasons, are crocodilians.

Speaker 22 Crocodilians.

Speaker 33 That's sort of a scientific way of talking about crocodiles, alligators, caimans, you know, all of these guys in the same group.

Speaker 11 That makes sense. They seem very dinosaur-y.

Speaker 10 Super dinosaury. Here's a crocodile sound.

Speaker 18 And you can see the crocodile's got its mouth closed when it's making this sound.

Speaker 23 It's making this sort of rumble.

Speaker 14 But if you watch Jurassic Park, you'll see a T-Rex opening its mouth to roar.

Speaker 23 And if T-Rexes are more like crocodiles, they probably would have just had more of a closed mouth rumble.

Speaker 23 So it's not just the sound, it's the way it made the sound.

Speaker 11 And like the projection.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 32 And crocodiles like actually shake their body when they do this.

Speaker 51 Yeah, there's that thing that alligators do, water, where they kind of, they rumble and make the water ripple.

Speaker 32 They basically shake the pond.

Speaker 11 Oh man, that's terrifying.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and then basically just imagine that scaled up to the size of a huge dinosaur.

Speaker 11 Even more terrifying.

Speaker 8 Johnny told me about this one scene in particular from Prehistoric Planet where he used tons of crocodile sounds.

Speaker 51 Crocodilians, yeah.

Speaker 32 Those were the cue.

Speaker 14 So this scene is basically showing this big T-Rex kind of guy.

Speaker 2 Two-tongues, 12-foot-tall Carnotaurus.

Speaker 31 That's David Attenborough, by the way.

Speaker 2 Clearing this patch has taken him a long

Speaker 31 So the Carnotaurus is basically standing in this forest clearing, getting ready to do sort of like a meeting call, and you can see his stomach actually going in and out when he rumbles.

Speaker 28 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 40 And he's doing this all with his mouth closed, which, from a sound perspective, makes sense to Johnny.

Speaker 51 You know, if you're trying to project a sound a long way, your body might need to behave more like a loudspeaker or something, you know.

Speaker 51 The vibration comes out through the body rather than just being kind of out through the hole.

Speaker 2 His cores are low-pitched and travel much farther through the dense vegetation than higher-pitched ones would do.

Speaker 30 We know that bigger things tend to make lower-pitched sounds, so Johnny just kind of pitched the crocodile sounds way down.

Speaker 51 I mean, it's the oldest trick, but it's a good one, you know, because it does make things sound bigger. You know, I mean, if you were to experience that in real life, I don't know,

Speaker 51 you wouldn't even really hear it, probably. You just feel this kind of intense kind of

Speaker 51 low vibration.

Speaker 30 And the scientists I talked to said this is exactly right.

Speaker 18 When you take a sound like this and scale it up to, you know, enormous dinosaur size, it gets to the point where it's actually infrasound.

Speaker 8 So kind of like infrared is too red for us to usually see.

Speaker 7 Infrasound is so low it can be hard to hear, which means a lot of a dinosaur call could have been hard for a person to hear.

Speaker 11 That's fascinating. Not only is it like unhearable in the past, but it's unhearable in the frequency.

Speaker 19 Yeah, we might not hear it.

Speaker 8 Our ear hairs wouldn't vibrate because they're too small, but bigger parts of our body would vibrate. Like we'd feel it in our legs or our chest or something.

Speaker 11 Oh my God.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 17 So that's crocodiles.

Speaker 40 Those are some close relatives, but they're not the closest.

Speaker 11 Yeah, aren't dinosaurs related to birds?

Speaker 19 Yeah, not just related.

Speaker 9 They're actually the direct descendants of dinosaurs.

Speaker 26 Birds are dinosaurs. Yes, 150%.

Speaker 18 So I talked to another paleontologist, Julia Clark, and she told me that birds descended from one particular group of dinosaurs called theropods, which include dinosaurs like a T-Rex.

Speaker 26 What I show my students, I used to put a roast chicken on the docu viewer in the classroom, and you can see the assembly of those structures that are in your roast chicken in the fossil record.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I learned how to cook by watching this TV show called Good Eats.

Speaker 11 And like the episode about how to take apart a chicken, take off the breast and the dark mean or whatever, he used a model of a T-Rex to like show all the pieces.

Speaker 11 So in my mind, every time I break down a chicken, I'm like, I'm breaking down a tiny dinosaur.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and this is something we've known for a while just from looking at the bones.

Speaker 32 But then like 30 years ago, scientists made this huge discovery that showed that dinosaurs probably looked like birds on the outside.

Speaker 26 On these dinosaurs that we previously related based on their bones to living birds, we find pinnate feathers that are uniquely known in living birds of all the animals out there.

Speaker 11 Okay, so like if birds literally are dinosaurs, Why bother with the crocodile sounds, right? Yeah. You get a lot more information from their direct relative rather than like a distant cousin.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's a great question.

Speaker 8 And it's basically because of the specific way that birds make sounds.

Speaker 26 Birds have a unique vocal organ.

Speaker 8 Birds make their sound using something called a syrinx.

Speaker 23 And they're actually the only animals that have these.

Speaker 26 You know, when frogs make their noises or I talk to you or bats produce echolocation calls, they're using structures that are located in what we call the larynx.

Speaker 30 A larynx is in your throat and the syrinx, the bird vocal organ, that's in the chest.

Speaker 26 Right next to the heart. So I like to say, remember, birds sing from the heart.

Speaker 33 But the issue here is that we don't actually know when syrinxes started to appear.

Speaker 33 We know that birds have them now. And we know that they're also the descendants of dinosaurs, but we haven't found an ancient dinosaur that seems to have a syrinx.

Speaker 5 So we don't know how far back they go.

Speaker 8 So we use some crocodile sounds and then we start thinking about bird sounds, but it's really hard because birds are dinosaurs, but vocally they might be different.

Speaker 11 What does that mean? Like, what do syrinxes sound like?

Speaker 20 So Michael, the paleontologist we heard from in the first half of the show, he says that because the syrinx is located deep in the chest, it can make birds super loud for their size.

Speaker 21 Think about how loud a little songbird can be outside your window. The thing weighs like 10 grams, right?

Speaker 21 So if the thing weighs 10 tons,

Speaker 21 that's a whole nother level.

Speaker 25 But a syrinx is also special for a totally different reason.

Speaker 21 There are left and right sides to the syrinx. There's not just one input, there's two inputs.

Speaker 21 And the left and right sides of the syrinx do not have to do the same thing at the same time, which means birds, for example, can produce multiple dominant pitches at the same time.

Speaker 9 They can basically sing a duet with themselves.

Speaker 21 And there are birds that do. There's some thrushes in particular that their primary songs sound like two birds singing together, but it's actually just one.

Speaker 21 They're just using the left and right sides of the syrinx independently.

Speaker 8 So this is a wood thrush, and you can hear how it's actually singing two notes at the exact same time.

Speaker 8 Wow.

Speaker 11 So we don't know how far back the syrinxes go in terms of like evolutionary history, but it seems like it could be possible that dinosaurs had them since they're so closely related to birds.

Speaker 41 Yeah, it's definitely possible.

Speaker 16 So a couple years ago, Julia was looking at a fossil that she'd been working on for a while.

Speaker 38 It was sitting on her desk.

Speaker 52 It was

Speaker 26 from about 67 million years ago from Antarctica.

Speaker 19 It was sort of like an ancient duck.

Speaker 40 Ancient duck.

Speaker 17 Ancient duck.

Speaker 9 And she CT scanned this fossil and she realized that she could see this faint imprint of a syrinx.

Speaker 8 She couldn't see it at first.

Speaker 38 It was like really deep in the chest.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I couldn't see it on the surface, but we were so lucky because it wasn't crushed at all. It wasn't broken into pieces.
It was just completely intact.

Speaker 13 This is way older than we knew before.

Speaker 18 And it takes us back to a time when dinosaurs were still around.

Speaker 30 So it raises the possibility that they could have had these.

Speaker 18 Now, Julia hasn't found that smoking gun yet, but syrinxes are really hard to find.

Speaker 19 And given that bird sounds are like in the realm of possibility here, I asked Johnny, the sound designer, if he ever used any on Prehistoric Planet.

Speaker 8 He told me about this one scene where these two pterosaurs get into this enormous fight because one of them is kind of like invading the other one's nest.

Speaker 2 The owner of the nest is back.

Speaker 19 Pterosaurs aren't technically dinosaurs, just to be clear, but they're sort of ancient relatives.

Speaker 51 I'm going to tell you a secret now. I've got a very kind of feisty chicken at our house in the back, and she's very fierce, you know.

Speaker 51 Evil Bluebell is her name, and so

Speaker 51 sometimes she will just make this squawk, and I took the squawk and I slowed it right down. I mean, we're talking sort of eight times.

Speaker 51 Suddenly, the richness of that sound and the kind of power behind it, and the ferocity was like, oh, yeah, that really works.

Speaker 10 So, that sound that

Speaker 19 that's bluebell?

Speaker 8 That's Johnny's pet chicken, bluebell, just slowed and pitched way down.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 30 And Michael, the paleontologist, he says that the bigger dinosaurs get, the weirder their sounds could get. If dinosaurs had syrines like birds, he says they could have made something like a honk.

Speaker 21 It's a honk, but it's like a tuba honk.

Speaker 21 So it's like a pulse, a very low sound.

Speaker 43 Like just sort of like, bah.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Very different. Like that.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 Is that him?

Speaker 22 That's him. He's doing his impressions.

Speaker 17 I'm just going to play you one more time. So my attempt at this dinosaur sound was bah.
Not a good attempt. Here's his attempt.

Speaker 11 Oh my God.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And because a syrinx could let them make two pitches at the same time, it could get way weirder.

Speaker 21 Get to

Speaker 21 tubas

Speaker 21 and have them play two different notes

Speaker 21 as loud as they can. It's just this kind of war rumble.

Speaker 30 And if you think about, you know, other kinds of bird sounds, Michael says there's even a chance dinosaurs could have had a sort of proto-bird song.

Speaker 21 It's possible. It's possible, but it'd be very proto.
So you would expect something a little bit more like the sounds made by somebody like an ostrich or an emu.

Speaker 30 Ostriches can make sort of whistles

Speaker 14 and emus can make these kind of weird clicks and clacks.

Speaker 11 Oh, interesting. But like,

Speaker 14 yeah, and listening to that gugga gagga sound, you know, I start thinking of that thrush song from before.

Speaker 14 If you pitch that thrush song way down to account for the size of like a huge dinosaur, it it starts to sound like that emu. So here's the thrush.

Speaker 23 Here it is pitched and slowed down.

Speaker 36 And here's the emu, which could be hinting at a sort of proto-bird song.

Speaker 14 Michael says that if it turns out dinosaurs did have syrines, they likely would have made some open-mouth sounds.

Speaker 14 And if that were true, Jurassic Park might have, you know, a better defense for its open-mouth T-Rex roar.

Speaker 8 But all of these possibilities could have been overlapping.

Speaker 12 Dinosaurs could have had proto-bird songs, they might have made war rumbles, and they could have done all of that while making closed-mouth crocodile growls.

Speaker 21 They might be doing open-mouth sounds with two different tones, and then could also do closed-mouth sounds via rumble, which means that they could rumble.

Speaker 21 And while your body's still shaking from the rumble, they could open their mouth and blast you with two non-infrasound, but still very low notes.

Speaker 21 While things are still kind of shaking from the rumble, it would be,

Speaker 21 it could get real interesting.

Speaker 8 I don't know. To me, it's like more

Speaker 15 imaginative, more creative than just the, you know, the big elephant roar.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 11 We have all these kind of half-answers.

Speaker 11 Some ideas of what dinosaurs could... have maybe sounded like based on creatures that we know about now, but it still feels like a bit of a leap.
These kind of feel like pretty speculative.

Speaker 19 Yeah, that is a totally valid point because remember, you know, the context of all of this is that we really just don't know that much about dinosaurs in general.

Speaker 22 Right.

Speaker 29 So sound, you know, is obviously way harder.

Speaker 19 But Johnny, the sound designer, he is actually excited about how little we know.

Speaker 51 That's the beauty of it, isn't it? Maybe in 50 years' time they'll be making something different, and all the dinosaurs will be talking or something. I don't know.

Speaker 11 Because they'll stumble across that extra

Speaker 11 special fossil that gives you just that one little extra hint of what it could be or what the missing piece is.

Speaker 33 Maybe we'll find that dinosaur syrinx, and the next version of Johnny's show, Prehistoric Planet, could have these war rumble tubahonks.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 11 I don't know.

Speaker 27 Like, this is this

Speaker 37 wonderful, fascinating example of artists and scientists kind of working hand in hand to advance

Speaker 15 what we can know about the past.

Speaker 36 You know, scientists are telling us what's possible.

Speaker 33 Sign designers are realizing that, and they're sort of working hand in hand to help us recreate a lost world in this beautiful way.

Speaker 51 Well, if somebody sees this and it kind of inspires them, you know, that's amazing just to sort of be part of that.

Speaker 11 It makes me honestly want to make a dinosaur roar.

Speaker 27 Well, I mean, dinosaur roar or

Speaker 22 dinosaur tuba honk.

Speaker 11 Tuba honk hiss.

Speaker 11 I mean, like,

Speaker 11 let's put this all together. Let's build our own dino sound, right? We got our sound designer, Christian.
Like, let's, let's build this ancient Jurassic world. What would that sound like?

Speaker 10 All right. Christian?

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 30 Let's hear what you got.

Speaker 44 So obviously, I spent most of my time on the T-Rex. I feel like that's the main attraction.
Okay. So I started with a chicken and I kind of got its bakaw.

Speaker 44 I slowed that down and pitched it down because a dinosaur would have lower frequencies.

Speaker 46 Wait, that's a chicken?

Speaker 27 That's the exact same sound.

Speaker 44 Just slowed down a bunch. On top of that, I added a sandpiper, pitched it down, stretched it.

Speaker 44 Because of the syrinx, I layered that twice on top of each other and played them at different frequencies after I slowed it down. And that sounds like this.

Speaker 44 Oh my god, that's a grand of all.

Speaker 44 And because of all the talk of tubas and kind of a low note in there, I made sure to add tubas to almost every part of this.

Speaker 44 I stretched them out and pitched them down because a tuba is not as big as a T-Rex.

Speaker 44 Along with that, there is an ostrich, which I don't think I even touched very much.

Speaker 44 And the coup of producer Meniuen's pigeon, Sunny.

Speaker 44 I added alligator just growling.

Speaker 44 And for texture, I added an emu throat noise.

Speaker 44 There's something about that sound that makes you feel like you're in danger.

Speaker 44 And bringing that all together, that sounds like this.

Speaker 44 I also wanted to put this T-Rex in a world.

Speaker 31 And maybe we can just pretend for a sec that all these dinosaurs lived at exactly the same time.

Speaker 40 Okay, yeah.

Speaker 44 The wind is rushing through the ancient trees. There are crickets in the background.

Speaker 44 I put a Parasaur Lophus over here.

Speaker 44 You can hear a Brachiosaurus hissing over there.

Speaker 44 A Stegosaurus rattling the keratin plates on its back.

Speaker 44 There are smaller dinosaurs running around,

Speaker 44 other dinosaurs making tuba sounds, clicking, clacking, booming, bellowing.

Speaker 44 It's just a really strange, alien and ancient world that even if we're wrong about how it sounded, I'm sure it sounded weirder than anything we could possibly imagine.

Speaker 24 This episode was produced by Noam Hassenfeld, who also wrote the music. It was edited by Catherine Wells and Brian Resnick, with help from Meredith Hodenaut.

Speaker 24 We had mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala and fact-checking from me, Richard Seema.

Speaker 24 The rest of the team includes Bird Pinkerton and Mandy Nguyen, who are looking for gossip and for salamanders, respectively.

Speaker 24 Just one super crucial fact check to note here. Turns out, there's some controversy about what kind of dinosaur Ducky from the Land Before Time actually is.

Speaker 24 The official Land Before Time website says she and her family are all Parasaura Lophuses. But some critics and fans aren't so sure.

Speaker 24 They think that based on the size of Ducky's wider jawline and her shorter, pointed, and upright pompadour skull cresting, she might have actually been a Saurolophus, not a Parasaurolophus.

Speaker 24 Confusingly, other dinosaurs with more proper Parasaurolophus features are depicted alongside members of Ducky's species in the original Land Before Time movie.

Speaker 24 Also, despite the similarity in their names, Saurolophuses and Parasaurolophuses are now thought to be only distantly related.

Speaker 24 And while we're here, The Land Before Time is not the only popular media we've referenced this episode that has gotten some dinosaurs mixed up.

Speaker 24 The Jurassic Park franchise has influentially portrayed Velociraptors as large, scaly predators that hunt in packs. Scientists now know that Velociraptors actually had feathers and likely hunted solo.

Speaker 24 The Velociraptors you see in the movies instead more resemble the Deinonychus.

Speaker 24 Michael Creton, who wrote the original best-selling Jurassic Park novel, actually based the descriptions of the story's primary dinosaur antagonists on the Deinonychus and decided to rename them to Velociraptor because he thought that name was more dramatic.

Speaker 24 It should be noted that Deanonychus comes from the Greek and means terrible claw, while Velociraptor means swift robber in Latin, so Deinonychus is the objectively cooler name.

Speaker 24 I just thought you deserved to know.

Speaker 24 If you want to get in touch with an episode idea or any kind of thoughts, you can email us at unexplainable at vox.com. We read every email.

Speaker 24 Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

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Speaker 52 this month on explain it to me we're talking about all things wellness we spend nearly two trillion dollars on things that are supposed to make us well collagen smoothies and cold plunges pilates classes and fitness trackers.

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