Scientists have discovered a dinosaur that may sting like a bird, suggesting that the evolutionary origin of Birdsong may be much older than we previously thought.
In a paper published last week in the journal Peerj, a team of international researchers described 163 million fossils found in Hebei Province, northeastern China. They are called fossil dinosaurs pulaosaurus qinglongwith a size of just 28 inches (72 cm), is largely complete, which has led the researchers to conduct an unusually detailed study of its anatomy, including its surprising bird throat.
“Even if you preserve the dinosaur skeleton, you don’t always keep these isolated bones in other skull elements,” Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and author of this article, told The New York Times. “They are very thin, very delicate and difficult to preserve.”
In vertebrates, sound organs protect the airway and can produce sounds, including basic sounds such as hissing, groaning and grunting. In most biological reptiles, these structures are made of cartilage and are relatively simple. However, birds have delicate, bone-like, flexible sound organs that can make more complex and diverse sounds.
Prasalus’ throat seemed to be in between. The researchers told the New York Times that its vocal cord structure appears to be similar to that of another dinosaur, Pinacosaurus.
Researchers believe that Pulaosaurus lived in the late Jurassic period and belonged to the same group of organisms, which later caused “duck-billed” dinosaurs like Hadrosaurs. But the prasone and the pinacosone are separated by millions of years of evolution, neither belonging to the dinosaurs that eventually produced birds. Although they may independently develop their own vocal traits, the existence of similar structures in this different species suggests that the ancient ancestors of dinosaurs may be harsh.
This means that the origin of Birdsong may have existed in creatures that lived 230 million years ago, but it remains a mystery as to how or when the creatures that evolved from modern Birds’ voice box, called Syrinx, or whether any dinosaurs share their incredible vocal abilities.
