![]() “Imagining oneself in the Late Cretaceous forests of Antarctica and elsewhere and thinking it is at this time that for the first time there are familiar sounds - not the trills of song birds but honks, quacks, whistles. Credit: Gabriel Ugueto Sixty-six million years ago, thanks to the Chicxulub meteorand possibly additional stressors like volcanic eruptions85 of the species on Earth went extinct, and the Cretaceous period drew to a close. This opens a whole new field of inquiry in the sounds of dinosaurs, Clarke said. An illustration of Ichthyornis, a bird that lived 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period. “The most exciting aspects of the study to me are - that the voice box of a bird can fossilize in 3-dimensional detail. But it wasn't until 2013 that Clarke noticed the rings of the syrinx through a micro-computed tomography of the fossil. As the Welsh Dragon shows, smaller dinosaurs were around 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic period. However, the miniaturization didn’t necessarily occur after the T-rex. The study was also published in Nature and led by Julia Clarke, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin. Part of the supporting evidence for this is that the head of birds, such as a chicken, bear a resemblance to infant dinosaurs. The fossils of the bird from the Cretaceus-age were first found in 1992 by members of Argentina's Antarctic institute and were detailed as a new species in a 2005 study that linked them to modern ducks and geese. “The importance of this discovery is that it lets us ascertain how the dinosaurs, including birds, evolved in the way they communicated with each other and how this organ that was capable of emitting sound, permitted brain development.” imitated a sound that can be compared to its living relatives, ducks and geese,” Argentine paleontologist Fernando Novas said at a news conference in Buenos Aires on Wednesday after the team published their conclusions in the journal Nature. The only widely recognized ancient bird was Archaeopteryx, known from fossils from about 150 million years ago. “We can now say that it's most probable that this bird. As recently as a few decades ago, dinosaurs were all depicted as reptilian things covered with olive-green scaly skin. They based their findings on unearthed fossils of the bird's sound-producing vocal organ known as the syrinx. The team of scientists says the “Vegavis Iaai” bird that lived in Antarctica's Vega Island more than 70 million years ago probably sounded like a modern-day duck. Now, they say they might know what one sounded like: quack! Scientists for years have known what birds living at the end of the age of dinosaurs looked like.
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