How do we know what dinosaurs sounded like?
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If you want to protect your favorite public media programming and podcasts like this one, visit AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action to learn how you can help. One more time, that's AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action. Thanks so much for standing up for public media. From the brains behind Brains On, this is the moment of um. Um, um, um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Shayla Farzan, and I'm about to be famous. Okay, not really famous. More like people recognize you at the grocery store kind of famous. But still, it's a big deal. I was just cast as the Tin Man in our community theater production of The Lizard of Oz.

You know, the Lizard of Oz, the most well-known dinosaur-themed version of the hit 1939 film, winner of five Tony Awards, and the most likely to make you sob in a theater award. Well, anyway, it's really famous, and I'm going to be in it.

So, I've been practicing a lot, and there's this one scene that I'm kind of nervous about. In the scene, I'm a dinosaur dressed up like the Tin Man on my way to see the Lizard of Oz. And I'm supposed to be singing about how much I want a heart. And I can totally do that. All my friends tell me I'm a natural performer. And sometimes they even call me a showboat, which I'm pretty sure is a big compliment. But

But here's my problem. How do we even know what dinosaurs sounded like? Like, did they sing like this? Or did they sing like this? My buddy Brian must be starring in The Lizard of Oz, too, because he had the same question. Hello, this is Brian in Ms. Greenwell's class at Southside Middle School, and we're wondering, how do we know what dinosaurs sound like?

The roaring that we see in movies is pretty much just movie magic. When they made Jurassic Park, which is everyone's, you know, first favorite dinosaur movie probably, those sounds were just kind of made up by the people making the movie. So it's actually hard to know for sure what a dinosaur sounded like. I'm Shaina Montaneri and I'm a paleontologist and science journalist. The parts of our throats that make sounds are soft.

And soft things don't really fossilize well. Usually we just see bones in the fossil record. If we're lucky, we see some soft things. But paleontologists can look to close relatives of dinosaurs like crocodiles and birds to guess what dinosaurs may have sounded like. Birds have a special voice box actually called the syrinx.

And they were the closest relatives of dinosaurs. Did they sing or make bird-like sounds? See, we don't know. If they had this syrinx, this kind of voice box that birds have, then maybe they did. But the oldest syrinx that's been discovered is about 67 million years old, but it was in a bird, not a dinosaur. And that discovery was very rare. So we may or may not find one ever in a dinosaur, even if it existed.

We don't know if dinosaurs like T-Rex had the same type of voice box. So we can look to crocodiles. And so a lot of paleontologists think that maybe the kind of rumbling sounds that crocodiles make or, you know, those kinds of sounds, maybe dinosaurs made something similar to that. So kind of scary. Um, uh,

So it's really hard to know exactly what dinosaurs sounded like because the parts of their throats that made sound were soft, like ours. And soft tissues usually don't turn into fossils we can find. But scientists do have some ideas. They think dinosaurs might have made closed-mouth sounds, like rumbles or growls, instead of big, open-mouthed roars like you'd see in the movies.

So I guess that means I should sing my part in The Lizard of Oz with my mouth closed and make it sound kind of rumbly. Oh, yeah, that's good. ♪

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