Creepy Reconstructed Ceratosaurus Vocalizations!
You’re in Utah, 150 million years before you first came into existence. It’s nearly midnight and the sky is almost pitch-black, only the moon glitters and reflects on the waters ahead. You venture deep into the forest nearby. Your view is cluttered with foliage and darkness. At some point, you feel an ominous sensation in your nerves. Your bones wriggle and twist. It gets louder and worse. You don’t know what’s going on until you hold your flashlight right in front of you and briefly spot the most horrifying creature you’ve ever witnessed. A monster the size of a car, but like a crocodile on steroids with menacing jaws, 3 crests on its head and huge talons. You are already dead.
The common misconception that dinosaurs roar like in popular culture is actually quite outlandish. Roaring is mainly a mammalian vocalisation and we’ve never found evidence of similar organs in dinosaurs. It’s even more obvious when you realise many dinosaur roars in the media are actually made up of mammal sounds, like tigers and elephants. We can use clues from the calls of reptiles and birds (the only extant dinosaurs) to reconstruct the sounds our misunderstood saurian friends made. Smaller non-avian dinosaurs like Mononykus would’ve vocalised like many modern bird species like pheasants, but larger ones like Ceratosaurus would’ve used booming calls similar to those of bitterns and ostriches, which you’d not only hear but also feel, which would be much more creepier than the generic mammalian roar you hear all the time. This horror of audio is called infrasound, and many large animals like whales use them for different purposes. We know large dinosaurs would’ve done this since as we know from fossils of Tyrannosaurus, it’s ears would’ve been suited to hear infrasound. These low frequency sounds would’ve been made by inflating the throat.
This short is actually a teaser for an upcoming project of reconstructed dinosaur sounds that you’ve may have seen on my stories last month, but I decided to post it here as a YouTube short as well. I used Eurasian Bittern (Botaurus stellaris) and American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) vocalisations to accurately recreate what the mighty Jurassic Ceratosaurus nasicornis would’ve sounded like.
Image from Julio Lacerda. Audio belongs to all their respective owners (I forgor who they belonged to). I recommend you wear your headphones to feel the hell you’d sense by the horned reptile.
Special thanks to @jackmills7758 for inspiring me!