9 DECEMBER 2017 • 7:00PM
The fearsome roar of Tyrannosaurus
Rex as
portrayed in film has left many a cinema-goer quaking in their seat.
But new research suggests the king of the
dinosaurs made a far more sinister sound.
For a new BBC documentary, naturalist Chris
Packham visited Julia Clarke, professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Texas, to test out a the theory that dinosaurs
actually sounded more like birds and reptiles, than today’s predatory mammals.
“The most chilling noises in the natural
world today come from predators, the howl of the wolf, the roar of the tiger,
but experts now doubt that T-Rex sounded anything like them,” said Packham.
Dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds and are
closely related to alligators and crocodiles, so Prof Clarke used the sound of
the Eurasian bittern, which makes an unearthly booming call, and the
vocalisations of Chinese crocodiles to estimate the noise T-Rex would have
made.
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