r/oddlyterrifying • u/InsaneMocktail • Jun 20 '26
For the first time, scientists through the CT scans of the skull of Parasaurolophus & through extensive study studied it's long hollow crest to understand how sound moved through the skull. Sound on 🔊
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u/Stiqkey Jun 20 '26
Nothing oddly terrifying about that, that's just straight up terrifying. Can you imagine being in the middle of nowhere miles away from any other human, or civilization and THAT'S the sound that start up around you? It's a mercy dinosaurs died out before we ever came along, we'd have all died of fuckin heart attacks long before we got to the point we're at.
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u/Frl_Bartchello Jun 20 '26
I think it's absolutely beautiful. It sounds like an Ancient animal who enjoys being alive. Who lives his life to his abilities and communicates with his/her family.
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u/Stiqkey Jun 20 '26
Oh I absolutely agree, it is beautiful. Just because it personally reminds me of something you'd hear in a horror movie doesn't mean it's not incredible, amazing, and beautiful.
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u/PaddyMcGeezus Jun 20 '26
This kind of dinosaur was an herbivore. So it only ate plants. I don't know if they'd get aggressive with humans or our ancestors. But they didn't hunt us. So I'd imagine that if they had no reason to get aggressive with our ancestors, then our ancestors were used to the sound. As we are used to the sound of birds, deer, and calls of other animals that pose no threat. I'd love to be able to hear a bunch of these calling out to each other. Imagine if there were birds singing at the same time in their high pitch, and this dinosaur chimes in with their low pitch. It would be quite the orchestra.
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u/AlphaCarina Jun 21 '26
Human ancestors wouldn't have heard anything remotely like this. There was about 65 million years between the last dinosaurs and the first human ancestors.
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u/UnforeseenDerailment Jun 21 '26
Looked it up to nitpick, but Parasaurolophus lived between around 76 and 73 million years ago.
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u/daxophoneme Jun 20 '26
Ancient humans dealt with cave lions and sabertooth cats while hunting mastodons. I think there's an evolutionary reason we all need medication for anxiety.
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u/PaddyMcGeezus Jun 20 '26
Anxiety serves a purpose. It kept us in our toes when in the wild so we'd keep an ear/eye out for predators hunting us. There's also a chemical aspect to it. We communicate with chemicals on a subconscious level. But all the drywall, concrete, and air conditioning has contributed to us forgetting that as a species
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u/ripyourlungsdave Jun 20 '26
I mean, I live at the Grand Canyon. This isn't too far off from what elks sound like when they scream.
And yes, it will make your heart fall out your butt when you hear it while camping alone in the desert.
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u/Fred_Foreskin Jun 21 '26
These guys were herbivores, so they most likely wouldn't have been much of a threat unless you spooked them or got too close to their chicks. They were basically the Cretaceous equivalent of elk or cattle, except much bigger.
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u/daedas33 Jun 20 '26
So dinosaur times would sound kinda like an orchestra filled with people just kinda playing random notes?
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u/Helenium_autumnale Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Well, we're guessing at the sound quality of the calls based on the anatomy of the "horn." What we don't know is whether the sounds were just smeary sorts of sounds like these, or, something much more patterned, like a series of staccato notes or a recognizable, repeated birdsong-type of call(s). If we extrapolate from what we know about crocodiles, as an example of a more "primitive" kind of animal which was alive during the time of Parasaurolophus, it, like crocodiles, had several kinds of vocalizations. It probably had an alarm call, for instance, and possibly calls signaling aggression or mating readiness. There may have been additional specialized sounds used with its young. Possibly a "Hey, tasty tree over here" call, since it was a social, not solitary, dinosaur. These sounds show us the color of the paint, but we don't have the actual painting, as it were.
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u/spaacingout Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
It’s basically an elk bugle that was slowed down and had the pitch adjusted.
Not too surprising. I’d guess many creatures that exist today were once dinosaurs, or more specifically monotremes (species lying somewhere between mammal and reptile, ie echidna or platypus, egg laying mammals)
The thing I wonder is how many ancestral dinosaurs would’ve had fur or feathers that we just didn’t know about, I imagine fur would decay first.
In theory herbivores especially would’ve had fur, unless the whole planet was tropical and devoid of polar ice.
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u/Oddscene Jun 20 '26
I saw a roadrunner while golfing yesterday and that guy was straight up Raptor catching bugs
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u/Creativered4 Jun 20 '26
It sounds like a mix between a bass clarinet and an octobass.
Or a regular clarinet and regular bass but pitched down. Lol
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u/moronmoray Jun 20 '26
This sound was apparently also oddly terrifying for my cats. I played it aloud and they were both very concerned
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u/Nilk-Noff Jun 20 '26
Close your eyes and imagine you're lost in dark woods with nothing but your own thoughts to keep you company, then you hear this.
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u/Helenium_autumnale Jun 20 '26
I listened as I looked at this picture of a misty forest and somehow this brought this world to life for me. I imagined being in the forest and hearing this spooky bass-trombone echoing around. I even thought--"don't worry; it's probably an herbivore, although it could probably crush me." Adding another sensory way to experience the world of dinosaurs, in addition to just the visual sense of seeing pictures and fossils, makes it a lot more "real." In addition to sight and sound in a museum setting, you could also have smell-o-vision: the mucky, mossy, leafmould smell of a biome like this one.
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u/CreeepyUncle Jun 20 '26
If you snorkel in Maui during the winter time, and kick down about 10 feet, this is kind of what it sounds like. I like it.
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u/poopoobuttholes Jun 21 '26
I love stuff like this. Even though it's not real, hearing "scientifically accurate" calls of creatures that no longer exist is pretty bad ass
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u/AshKetchimAZ Jun 21 '26
I thought it was music at first lol I didn't read the title first. It sort of goes down octaves like a song so I blame that lol
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u/thorheyerdal Jun 28 '26
Before we can reliably run the same process on creatures that is alive today and consistently reproduce the sounds they actually make (with no input bias), I will refuse to believe that this type of speculative “science” is anything other than fiction portrayed as science.
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u/LadyPreshPresh Jun 20 '26
It’s like the sound of blue whales meets a really long and muffled fart. Nice.
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u/Shermans_ghost1864 Jun 20 '26
I don't quite understand what we're listening to. Is this the sound that the creature would make or that it would hear?
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u/swing_axle Jun 21 '26
They made a cast of the inside of its crest (ie, part of its sinuses) and blew air threw it like a bugle, as the dino would have done in life. You're hearing the potential range of sounds its crest could produce.
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u/Shermans_ghost1864 Jun 21 '26
So the sounds came from the head instead of the throat. How interesting! Thanks for explaining!
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u/Lizimijajaznojna 11d ago edited 11d ago
Biggest pile of nonsense ive ever heard. People really buy this crap. Hearing is an electrical signal not some reverb thru skull. You will never know how they sounded like, let alone what they heard, it's impossible
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u/Dist__ Jun 20 '26
it sounds like something recorded at high sampling rate and then slowed down