- Arthouse in French
-Gritty in Russian or Korean.
- Big, hairy-footed in New Zealendish,
- Marvelishly super-heroed
- Even the occasional "Find love, lose love, find puppy, lose puppy, lost love finds puppy, find both" RomCom.
But the ones I like best are the ones that get me thinking...
Keep on Scrolling :)
- about science!
Now a classic for that was the 1993 Jurassic Park – not a great movie, but certainly a goody for thinking
“could you do that?”
(worth a look at Year 12s - talks PCR and cloning (although it seems immensley unlikely Dino DNA will be clonable let alone actual Dino's)
“did dinosaurs do that?”
Or –
Did they sound like that?
Did T rex roar?
Cackle?
Squeak?
(It would pretty weird being chased across a dinosaur theme park by a 12m long, 7 tonne squeaking
killer!)
Of course we don’t know.
Fossilised skeletal remains just don’t and won’t tell you sounds of the past.
Well in, most cases - no, but in one case, they actually, probably do!
Its all because of that weird looking head.
You've got to admit this looks pretty odd. A bit like an antelopes horn in appearance, but totally different in structure. Look carefuly, - its a boney bit that starts at the nostrils and sweeps way back about 1.5 metres, then returns to the top of the head. If we take scans of it ( and people have) we find that not only is this crest hollow, but it has several tubes, some blind ended, others leading in a loop from back of the throat to the nostrils. So when it blew out through its nose, the air went several three metres further than it breathed out through the mouth. A bit like breathing through a trombone.... |
So what if these guys used these amazing, hollow, nasal crests to do the same?
Well the cool thing that I just LOVE about this story is that scientists in NEW MEXICO used computer simulations based on those scanned tubes and worked out not only their resonances BUT ALSO the sorts of sounds that these dinosaurs could have made! SO WE CAN NOW HEAR SOUNDS THESE GUYS COULD HAVE MADE 75 MILLION YEARS AGO!!!!!
Listen in awe!!!
In related species of dinosaurs, also with tubular nasal crests, just smaller ones, scientists have calculated the frequency range for the sounds produced for the crests and compared them to the scanned sizes of the cochlears (inner ears) of these dinosaurs. The length of the cochlear determines the frequencies that can be heard. Nicely the ranges match.
Intriguingly, youngsters have smaller crests which would make higher pitched sounds. But the adult cochlears would still pick those up. So mums and dads could hear their babies' cries!
Over the weekend I emailed one of the researchers who helped create these amazing extinct sounds to find out if any other sounds have been recreated like this one. He commented that, at the moment, it is the only such study. With other crest scans it is possible with others but
"So much to do and so little time…"
There is so much amazing science to discover out there, scientists will be kept busy in this and other fields for a long, long time to come!!!
Have a fun fact filled Tuesday. And remember the call of the ancient wild!
Please scroll down for the post-disclaimer comment.
Further!
Further!
GOOD LUCK YEAR 12!!!!!
study hard and stay awesome!