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It's peak summer blockbuster season, so we wanted to share one of our favorite blockbuster inspired episodes. It all started a couple years ago when our supervising producer Meredith Hadnott went to see the latest Jurassic Park sequel at a drive-in. All the giant dinosaur roars were coming out of my car speakers, and it's like, how do they know what dinosaurs sounded like? 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? 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. Jurassic Park wasn't really going for what dinosaurs actually sounded like. They were going for more of a feeling.
So if you think about that iconic T-Rex sound, it was this huge roar. And it was actually made by combining a bunch of different animals. So the basic ones are sort of this low-pitch, tiger sound, combined with some other sounds, and actually this baby elephant. And then other roars through the movies have lions, some donkey screams, classic. They had some dolphin screeches. They actually have koala mating calls? Amazing.
Oh my god, I feel like I have a new respect for koalas now. I mean, yeah, and all of these sounds come together to make that iconic roar. So most of the animals they used for these sounds were mammals, which is kind of weird because dinosaurs are reptiles. So they're just distinctly not mammals. Yeah, so the sound designer for Jurassic Park actually told this story about the scientists coming up to him and being like, I really don't think the dinosaurs would have sounded like this.
You basically responded, it's a movie. Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one that has this question. The question is still open, right? If Jurassic Park was wrong, what's right? And that's what I want to tell you about on this week's show. I want to take on this wild sounding question of how do you even go about trying to reconstruct an ancient sound? And especially for our very specific purposes, what did dinosaurs sound like?
Oh my god, I am so ready for this journey with you. Let's go. Let's do this. I'm so proud. 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. Not only are dinosaurs gone, but the amount that we know about dinosaurs is just strikingly tiny.
Okay, we've only found one individual dinosaur for every 10,000 years. And that's for a hundred million years of when dinosaurs were on the planet. Yeah. And because of that, like we're still discovering almost 50 new species of dinosaurs every single year, like today in 2022. Oh my god, there's so little we know even about how they look. Right. So then when you start thinking about how they sound, it's like even more of femoral. It's a significantly harder question to answer.
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. How could a roar be fossilized? So the parts of the body that make the roar, like looking for those things, right? The throat in like exactly. There's resonance in the hollow bones or something. All of those words, some combination of all of those words.
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? Like how could you get this information?
There's actually one really interesting example that shows just how lucky you need to be. Okay. 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. And wings are the actual things that make the sound for this cricket.
So the scientists were able to just figure out exactly how the wings were shaped, compare them to live in crickets, and then just reconstruct what this super ancient cricket sounded like. I mean, like going back to the Jurassic Park metaphor like this. This is the mosquito in the amber, right? This is almost exactly because this is a cricket. It's equivalent of finding the vocal cords preserved. Do you want to hear the sound? Oh, yeah.
Okay. So this is... I don't want to say for sure, but this might be the oldest sound of a living thing ever reconstructed. It's so familiar and yet so like different at the same time. But this is like a cricket sound. Like it's kind of a far cry from a dinosaur sound, the far roar from a dinosaur sound. Yeah. So is there anything that's like in exoskeleton but for dinosaurs?
Yeah. Yeah. So this is the sort of a big question, right? Like if you can reconstruct an ancient cricket sound, can you do the same thing for a dinosaur? Mm-hmm. And you sort of can. 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 parasor alofas. Parasor alofas, all right? Parasor alofas. You've actually probably seen it. What, Lynn, before time character is it?
It's actually ducky. I'm not ducky. We go way back. Yeah. It's like that dinosaur that has a skull shaped like slick back hair or sort of like ponytail. The pompadour situation. And it turns out that that, you know, pompadour is really, really important for shaping sound. So that thing on the parasor alofas head is actually a tube. It is actually hollow on the inside and it connect to the nasal passages, essentially the airway for the animal.
And so when it took deep breaths, it would be forcing air through that sort of tubing. And the idea is that this hollow tube might actually be used to shape the sound that the parasor alofas made. It's like a dinosaur megaphone. Yeah, or like the cone that a cheerleader shouts into. Right. 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.
So scientists could actually make a sort of educated guess. It sounds kind of like a fog horn type thing. Are the vuvus ailes? Yeah, right. And then they were like, okay, let's check this a different way. Would the parasor alofas have been able to hear this sound? And it does line up. The ear ossicles are the size and shape you would expect to hear that sound range is like a sweet spot. Also makes sense that they're calling out to their buddies.
Exactly. So we know which frequencies work best with the tube. We know which frequencies work best with the ear. So we can kind of get this sound even though we don't really know the ultimate sound that was generated into it. It seems like a good guesstimate though. It is a really creative guesstimate and it was initially done by this guy David Weissample, who is Michael's PhD supervisor.
And that actually resulted in the staff of the original Jurassic Park from the 1993 Jurassic Park calling him for consultation on dinosaur sounds. Although they didn't like a lot of what he had to say. They liked some of what he had to say.
They liked the parasor alofas thing and actually you can hear the parasor alofas calls in the background of voice, 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 and maze look. And you can hear the parasor alofas in the background. Welcome to Jurassic Park. You hear those kind of like fog horny things in the background? Yeah, totally. You can hear it like echoing off the misty mountainside.
So to Jurassic Park's credit, they did get the parasor alofas kind of right. 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. Right. On the other hand, there's another part of that same scene that's really not as good. So the first big dinosaur you see is a brachiosaurus, you know like the big one with the long neck. The drafts of the dinosaur world. Classic dinosaur, right? Right. But they first see this brachiosaurus.
That's the first big dinosaur they encounter and this is what it sounds like. The brachiosaurus itself is trumpeting like an elephant. And he had definitely advised them against that. David was like, I don't think brachiosauruses would sound like that. The big long neck dinosaurs probably didn't produce much sound. He said they could probably hiss. So real brachiosauruses would probably just go. Wait, I missed that. Could you repeat that? Pretend I'm a brachiosaurus. It's in my head.
No one was aaurus. One more time. It's just not the sound you'd expect from a dinosaur. Where would the hiss come from though? So this is another sound that you can figure out by looking at actual fossils. And it all has to do with the neck. The primary nerves that run the vocal muscles in your larynx and your voice box. Run down your neck into your trunk and then back up your neck to get to the larynx. So it's twice the length of your neck. Okay. Super long.
And we tend to think of nerves as being instantaneous. But they're not. 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. And the thing you're trying to control only works as you can control it quickly. And if you're a brachiosaurus with this super long neck, you got a real problem. Right. There's no way they could control this elephant kind of voice. The best they could do was basically just push air out their mouths.
And it's just sort of like that's this moment of like, okay, we have these pictures of these enormous, majestic epic dinosaurs. And it's just hard to imagine them going like, definitely not cinematic. Yeah, not exactly blockbuster style. And Michael's advisor David, he knew all the science and you know, he was talking to the Jurassic Park people over the phone. And this is the part they really didn't like. He told me the story and they said he was just he said hiss.
There was just dead silence in the end of the phone. They're like, really? Yes. They were like, no, that's not a brachiosaurus. You could hear the ancient crickets. I love imagining him on the phone just like hissing to Jurassic Park executives. I mean like, okay, so we got the brachiosaurus. We got the pompador traffic cone situation. But I just 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, shh. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, even though we have all these fossils, that core voice is sort of a black box. Yeah. Jurassic Park's answer to this black box is let's just get some scary mammal roars. But there is another way to try and figure out what the actual dinosaur voice sounded like. That's not just vibes. And people are doing this. Well, how are they doing that? I will tell you after the break.
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$15 a month. $15 a month. $15 a month. $15 a month. $15 a month. $15 a month. Okay, Meredith, we're back. Noah. Dinosaur sounds. No sounds. Before the break, we were trying to figure out ancient sounds by looking at fossilized structures. Yeah, concrete things that we can see and learn from. That parasoar locust tube, the brachiosaurus neck. Totally. We said neither of these tell us about that core voice, the actual thing that made the sound.
But I talked to this guy whose job it is to create sounds from the ancient past. My name is Johnny Crew and I'm a sound designer. Conveniently, Johnny sounds designed dinosaurs. Amazing job. Incredible job. What does his business card look like? His business card is just yippee. 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. I mean, who doesn't love dinosaurs?
So Johnny's been working on this Apple TV plus show prehistoric planet, which has this super scientific approach. 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. No mammals. So initially it was a bit like, oh, right, okay. Because when Johnny made dinosaur sounds for other movies, he used a lot of mammal sounds. You couldn't rely on any of that stuff. We had to kind of start again from scratch.
What does that mean? How do you start from scratch on a dinosaur sound that no one's ever heard? Basically, you can look at animals that are related to dinosaurs that are alive today and see how they make sounds. All right. Who's there? Dino cousin. So some cousins that they have, which are especially interesting for sound reasons, are crocodilians. Crocodilians. So that's sort of the scientific way of talking about crocodiles, alligators, camons, you know, all of these guys in the same group.
That makes sense. They seem very dinosaur-y. Super dinosaur-y. Here's a crocodile sound. And you can see the crocodiles got its mouth closed when it's making this sound. It's making this sort of rumble. But if you watch Jurassic Park, you'll see a T-Rex opening its mouth to roar. And if T-Rexes are more like crocodiles, they probably would have just had more of a closed mouth rumble. So it's not just the sound. It's the way it made the sound. Like the projection.
Right. And crocodiles like actually shake their body when they do this. Yeah, there's that thing that alligators do. Water. But they kind of, they rumble and make the water ripple. They basically shake the pond. Oh, man. That's terrifying. Yeah, and then basically just imagine that scaled up to the size of a huge dinosaur. Even more terrifying. Johnny told me about this one scene in particular from prehistoric planet where he used tons of crocodile sounds. Crocodilians. Yeah. Those were the key.
So this scene is basically showing this big T-Rex kind of guy. Two tongue, twelve foot tall, Carnotaurus. That's David Attenborough, by the way. Clearing this patch. I've taken him a long time. 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 rumble. Oh, absolutely. And he's doing this all with his mouth closed, which from a sound perspective makes sense to Johnny.
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. The vibration comes out through the body rather than just being kind of out through the hole. He's caused a low pitched and travel much farther through the dense vegetation than higher pitched ones would do. We know that bigger things tend to make lower pitched sounds. So Johnny just kind of pitched the crocodile sounds way down.
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. You wouldn't even really hear it. Probably you just feel this kind of intense, kind of low vibration. And the scientists, I talked to, said this is exactly right. 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.
So kind of like infrared is to red for us to usually see. 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. That's fascinating. Not only is it like unhearable in the past, but it's unhearable in the frequency. Yeah, we might not hear it. 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. Oh my god.
Yeah, so that's crocodiles. Those are some close relatives, but they're not the closest. Yeah, aren't dinosaurs related to birds? Yeah, not just related. They're actually the direct descendants of dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs. Yes, 150%. So I talked to another paleontologist, Julia Clark, and she told me that birds descended from one particular group of dinosaurs called Therapods, which include dinosaurs like a T-Rex.
What I show my students, I used to put a roast chicken on the dock you viewer in the classroom. And you can see the assembly of those structures better in your roast chicken, in the fossil record. Yeah, I learned how to cook by watching this TV show called Good Eats. And the episode about how to take a part in a chicken, take off the breast and the dark meat or whatever. He used a model of a T-Rex to show all the pieces.
So in my mind, every time I break down a chicken, I'm like, I'm breaking down a tiny dinosaur. Yeah, this is something we've known for a while just from looking at the bones. But then like 30 years ago, scientists made this huge discovery that show that dinosaurs probably looked like birds on the outside. 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.
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. Yeah, it's a great question. And it's basically because of the specific way that birds make sounds. Birds have a unique vocal organ. Birds make their sound using something called a syringes. And they're actually the only animals that have these.
You know, when frogs make their noises or I talk to you or that's produce echolocation calls, they're using structures that are located in what we call the larynx. A larynx is in your throat and the syringes, the bird vocal organ, that's in the chest. Right next to the heart. So I like to say, remember birds sing from the heart. But the issue here is that we don't actually know when syringes started to appear.
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 syring. So we don't know how far back they go. 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. What does that mean? Like what do syringes sound like?
So Michael, the paleontologist we heard from in the first half of the show, he says that because the syringes is located deep in the chest, it can make birds super loud for their size. Think about how loud a little songbird can be outside your window. The thing weighs like 10 grams, right? So if the thing weighs 10 tons, that's a whole nother level. This is also special for a totally different reason.
There are left and right sides to the syringes. There's not just one input, there's two inputs. And the left and right sides of the syringes 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. They can basically sing a duet with themselves. 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.
They're just using the left and right sides of the syringes independently. So this is a woodthrush, and you can hear how it's actually singing two notes at the exact same time. Wow. So we don't know how far back the syringes go in terms of like evolutionary history, but right. Seems like it could be possible that dinosaurs had them since they're so closely related to birds. Yeah, it's definitely possible.
So a couple of years ago, Julia was looking at a fossil that she'd been working on for a while. It was sitting on her desk. It was from about 67 million years ago and from Antarctica. It was sort of like an ancient duck. And she CT scanned this fossil and she realized that she could see this faint imprint of a syringes. You couldn't see it at first. It was like really deep in the chest. 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. This is way older than we knew before. And it takes us back to a time when dinosaurs were still around. So it raises the possibility that they could have had these. Now Julia hasn't found that smoking gun yet, but syringes are really hard to find. And given that bird sounds are like in the realm of possibility here, I asked Johnny, the sound designer, if he ever used any unprehistoric planet.
He told me about this one scene where these two terosaurs get into this enormous fight because one of them is kind of like invading the other one's nest. Terosaurs aren't technically dying the source just to be clear, but they're sort of ancient relatives. I'm gonna tell you a secret now. I've got a very kind of feisty chicken in our house at the back. And she's very fierce, you know. Evil blue bell is her name.
And so 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. Suddenly the richness of that sound and the kind of power behind it and the ferocity was like, oh yeah, that really works. So that sounded that's blue bell that's Johnny's pet chicken and blue bell just slowed and pitched way down. And Michael the paleontologist, he says that the bigger dinosaurs get the weirder their sounds could get.
If dinosaurs had syringes like birds, he says they could have made something like a honk. It's a honk, but it's like a tuba honk. So it's like a pulse of very low sound like just sort of like yeah. Very different like that. Yeah. Is that him? That's him. He's going to play you one more time. So my attempt at this dinosaur sound was not a good attempt. Here's his attempt. Oh my god. Yeah. And because the syringes could let them make two pitches at the same time, it could get way weirder.
Get to tubas and have them play two different notes. As loud as they can. It's just this kind of war rumble. 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. It's possible. It's possible. It'd be very proto. So you would expect something a little bit more like the sounds made by something like an ostrich or an emu. Ostriches can make sort of whistles.
An emu's can make these kind of weird clicks and clacks. How interesting. But like. Yeah. And listening to that go go go go sound. You know, I start thinking of that thrush song from before. If you pitch that thrush song way down to account for the size of like a huge dinosaur, it starts to sound like that emu. So here's the thrush. Here it is pitched and slowed down. And here's the emu, which could be hinting at a sort of proto bird song.
Michael says that if it turns out dinosaurs did have syringes, they likely would have made some open mouth sounds. And if that were true, Jurassic Park might have, you know, a better defense for its open mouth T-Rex roar. But all of these possibilities could have been overlapping. And 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.
They may be doing open mouth sounds with two different tones. And then could also close mouth sounds of your rumble, which means that they could rumble. And while your body's still shaking from the rumble, they could open their mouth and blast you with two non-infrasound that still very low notes. While things are still kind of shaking from the rumble, it would be, it could get real interesting.
I don't know. To me, it's like more imaginative, more creative than just the, you know, the big elephant roar. Okay. We have all these kind of half answers. And 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. 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. And the sound, you know, is obviously way harder. But Johnny, the sound designer, he is actually excited about how little we know. That's the beauty of it, isn't it? Maybe in 50 years time, they'll be making something different. And will the dinosaurs be talking or something? I don't know.
Because they'll stumble across that extra special fossil that gives you just that one little extra hint of what it could be or what the missing pieces. Maybe we'll find that dinosaur Syrinks and the next version of Johnny's show, Prius Roy Planet, could have these war rumble tuba hogs. Yeah. I don't know. Like this is this wonderful, fascinating example of artists and scientists kind of working hand in hand to advance what we can know about the past.
You know, scientists are telling us what's possible. Signs designers are realizing that and they're sort of working hand in hand to help us recreate a lost world in this in this beautiful way. But if somebody sees this and it kind of inspires them, you know, that's amazing just to sort of be part of that. It makes me honestly want to make a dinosaur roar. Well, I mean, dinosaur roar or dinosaur tuba hunk. Tuba hunk is.
I mean, like, let's put this all together. Let's build our own dinosaur sound. Right? We got our sound designer Christian. Like, let's build this ancient Jurassic world. What would that sound like? All right. Christian. Yeah. What's there? What you got? 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 Bacaw. I slowed that down and pitched it down because a dinosaur would have lower frequencies.
Wait, that's a chicken. That's the exact same sound. Just slowed down a bunch. On top of that, I added a sandpiper, pitched it down, stretched it. Because of the serencs, 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. Oh my god. That's incredible. 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.
I stretched them out and pitched them down because a tuba is not as big as a T-Rex. Along with that, there is an ostrich, which I don't think I even touched very much. And the coup of producer Manny Wens Pigeon, Sonny, I added alligator just growling. And for texture, I added an emu throat noise. There's something about that sound that makes you feel like you're in danger. And bringing that all together, that sounds like this. I also wanted to put this T-Rex in a world.
And maybe we can just pretend for a second that all these dinosaurs live at exactly the same time. The wind is rushing through the ancient trees. There are crickets in the background. I put a parasora lofus over here. You can hear a brachiosaurus hissing over there, a stegosaurus rattling the keratin plates on its back. There are smaller dinosaurs running around, other dinosaurs making tuba sounds, clicking, clacking, booming, bellowing.
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. This episode was produced by Noam Hasenfeld, who also wrote the music. It was edited by Catherine Wells and Brian Resnick, with help from Meredith Houghtonaut. We had mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala and fact checking from me, Richard Sema.
The rest of the team includes Bird Pinkerton and Manine Nguyen, who are looking for gossip and for salamanders, respectively. 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. The official Land Before Time website says she and her family are all parasora lofuses, but some critics and fans aren't so sure.
They think that based on the size of Ducky's wider jawline and her shorter pointed and upright pompadora skull cresting, she might have actually been a saurolofus, not a parasorlofus. Confusantly, other dinosaurs with more proper parasorlofus features are depicted alongside members of Ducky's species in the original Land Before Time movie. Also, despite the similarity in their names, saurolofuses and parasorlofuses are now thought to be only dissonally related.
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. The Jurassic Park franchise has influential portrayed Velosteraptors as large-scale predators that hunt and packs. Scientists now know that Velosteraptors actually had feathers, and likely hunted swallow. The Velosteraptors you see in the movies, instead more resemble the Dianonicus.
Michael Cretan, who wrote the original, best-selling, Jurassic Park novel, actually based the descriptions of the story's primary dinosaur antagonists on the Dianonicus, and decided to rename them to Velosteraptor because he thought that name was more dramatic. It should be noted that Dianonicus comes from the Greek, and means terrible claw, while Velosteraptor means Swift, Robert, and Latin. So Dianonicus is the objectively cooler name. I just thought you deserved to know.
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In the new season of Crucible Moments, a podcast by Sequoia Capital, host Rulof Bohta, talks to the founders of these tech giants and others, as they go beyond the creation myths and reflect on the make or break moments that shaped them. Tune into the new season of Crucible Moments and catch up on season 1 at CrucibleMoments.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen to Crucible Moments today. Artificial Intelligence, Smart Houses, Electric Vehicles We are living in the future.
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