I always get excited when I do a post about dinosaurs because I get to look for a picture of a dinosaur!
How does a dinosaur rawr? The world of dinosaurs, and especially big ones like the T Rex was deep and low. Research done on archosaurs - birds, crocodiles, alogators and dinosaurs, shows the similarities in the anatomical ear structure in the creatures. The research says that dinosaurs would produce the same noise that they were hearing.
“As a general rule, animals can hear the sounds that they produce,” lead author Robert Dooling told Discovery News.
Dooling is a professor of psychology and co-director of the Center for the Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing at the University of Maryland at College Park. He conducted the comparative study on archosaur ear data with German neuroanatomists Otto Gleich and Geoffrey Manley.
The team of researches took measurements of living animals as well as fossilized brachiosaurus, allosaurus and archeoptry finding that the body mass is greatly correlated to the size of the animals ear.
This determination allowed the scientists to extrapolate the hearing of the smallest bird, which weighs just around a third of an ounce, to that of huge dinos like brachiosaurus, which weighed 75 tons.
Dooling and his team believe hearing in such large dinosaurs was restricted to low frequencies with a high frequency limit below 3 kilohertz.
Smaller dinosaurs, however, likely could hear and emit higher frequency sounds since, as Dooling explained, “large organisms (in general) hear best and produce sounds at lower frequencies, while smaller organisms hear best and produce sounds at higher frequencies.”
Some researchers are suggesting that the dinosaurs could have been the “strong, silent type” and that vocalizations evolved to match hearing range rather than the reverse.
So you know how the T.Rex in Jurassic Park had that really high pitched loud screaming rawr? …Yeah, probably not.
