Could dinosaurs hear you whistle?

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Terrible Lizards dinosaur bites, bite-size extracts from old bonus episodes and lives to keep you going.

[00:00:09]This from G.

[00:00:10]So, mammals that's us have big external ears. And I've read that dinosaurs would have had limited range of hearing, more so focused on the lower ranges, the rumbling of a bitten type thing.

[00:00:22]What would this mean that they wouldn't be able to hear whistling? Could a dinosaur hear you whistle, Dave?

[00:00:30]Um dinosaurs will have external ears as in there's an ear that you can physically see on the outside of the head, but they don't have pinnae.

[00:00:39]They don't have earlobes and external mammalian type ears. But that's not what's going to limit their hearing because of course birds have dinosaur-like ears and plenty of them can listen to high pitches, otherwise they wouldn't be singing high-pitched songs.

[00:00:55]Um I think the problem with you know, dinosaurs have a limited range of hearing. Um I don't know and as a whole maybe some species don't have a particularly wide range.

[00:01:08]Um but it's the usual, you know, whenever you say did dinosaurs do X, the answer of 1,500 plus species at a minimum across 150 million years, yes, one of them will have done whatever it is. But generally big animals tend to make deep noises and therefore are also listening for deeper noises and small animals make higher pitched noises and they're listening for higher pitched noises.

[00:01:33]I seem to remember, was it Tiamatlangia?

[00:01:36]This um very incomplete Tyrannosaur that's basically just a brain case and a bit of skull from a what say is Pakistan. Off the top of my head, the study of the ears of that suggested that actually they could hear unusually high pitches despite being quite a large animal. Um so I don't think there's any particular specific right like you know, you know, I don't think they have dinosaurs as a whole have a narrow range, whether that's a narrow range up or a narrow range down. I think they have a range of hearing that's going to vary depending on how good your hearing is.

[00:02:12]Some dinosaurs have very good hearing, some have had terrible hearing just like mammals and birds and everything else.

[00:02:17]And some of them at least can definitely hear high-pitched stuff. Um A cuz I know it's turned up in a couple of studies, but when you talk about Alverasaurus and Troodontids and things that weigh a kilo, there's no way they're not making high-pitched sounds and they're not going to be attuned to listening to high-pitched sounds. So, I'm sure that's not an issue.

[00:02:37]Bittens, Dave. Very low and booming.

[00:02:40]>> Well, they make a deep boom, but the I think a bitten quite a bit bigger than an Alverasaurus. Yeah, let's put it Pachycephalosaurus cheat cuz they dig their little hollows so that they can echo.

[00:02:50]Yeah.

[00:02:51]I mean But the whistling. I don't think I don't think cuz like How was it we were talking about? Cuz it was one of the things that early on that blew my mind was the fact that the reason that we have lips and facial expressions and presumably, you know, the fact that we can whistle is because we're mammals and we have to have the mouth ability to be able to suckle, whereas dinosaurs never did. But that said, I've listened to a starling and they don't need a mouth to whistle.

[00:03:17]Yeah, again, you know, there's some super high-pitched stuff that small birds can produce.

[00:03:23]Um and even quite big birds.

[00:03:25]Um and again, even even even quite big animals can make surprisingly high-pitched sounds like us. Um Right. Uh well, how normal that is is another matter entirely. Like yeah, I can't I can't go This this is this is one of those weeks I believe where the bonus episode is going to be much better than the actual podcast. We got Dave squeaking, everybody. It is beautiful. Okay, this one here is from Ingrid. I'm really enjoying the podcast. I do have a lot of questions, but one in particular that I can't find answered anywhere. But I imagine there's a straightforward answer to. When it comes to the non-avian feathered dinosaurs that had feathers that look like modern branched flying feathers rather than single filaments, were these feathers scaled to the size of the dinosaur? Did any of the larger dinosaurs actually have the branch type feather and if so, would the feathers be gigantic, too?

[00:04:23]So, are you in?

[00:04:26]Don't know, but probably is the short version. So, bigger animals have bigger feathers. There is I don't know what it is, but there is going to be a size limit at some point.

[00:04:36]Like you're the the mechanics of feathers means you're not going to be able to make insanely big 4-m long feathers. You know, they're yeah, just going to break under their own under their own mass, etc. Um but given that we've got fossil flying birds like Argentavis that are considerably bigger than extant birds, there's no reason to think those just simply didn't have massive feathers on them.

[00:04:59]Um Argentavis 5-m wingspan if not more.

[00:05:06]So, consider considerably bigger than things like albatross and built and built like buzzards and eagles and therefore really big properly feathered wings, not really thin narrow little How the hell it must take them years to take off. I've seen swans try to take off and it's a nightmare.

[00:05:22]>> Yeah, yeah, they're probably not great.

[00:05:24]Um but anyway, in terms of things where we have absolute direct evidence of the size of the feather, um not very many or at least none of them are very big. So, when you're talking about the sort of, you know, modernish bird feathers, not the filamentous stuff, you're really in the last couple of clades of dinosaurs before birds. So, over at Torosaurus, Dromaeosaurs, Troodontids, and then Anchiornithiformes if they're separate and if not, they're in there.

[00:05:54]Most of those things aren't very big anyway. Loads of them are very very small and those [snorts] are the ones that tend to have feathers preserved on them. So, they tend to have small feathers. They're crow-sized animals with crow-sized feathers. Bigger ones have bigger feathers that I've seen.

[00:06:10]Smaller ones have smaller feathers I've seen. You'd expect that kind of correlation. And you'd expect that whether they're flying or not, you know, ostriches have really big feathers and they don't fly. Uh but Velociraptor is probably the largest thing we've got where we really got some evidence of the size of the feather because they have the famous quill knobs on the ulna.

[00:06:29]The bigger the quill knob, the bigger the big feather attached to it and these would be the big primary feathers, so some of the biggest feathers on the animal.

[00:06:35]Velociraptor has pretty sizable quill knobs. That implies a pretty sizable primary feather.

[00:06:41]The handful of really big things we've got like Gigantoraptor, no feathers preserved and to my knowledge either no ulna or no quill knobs on the ulna.

[00:06:51]I would be amazed if Gigantoraptor didn't have really big feathers.

[00:06:57]Haven't seen them. No direct evidence that I know of.

[00:07:01]I found it really weird that on a chicken I could find the quill knobs on a chicken, but not on a turkey on the ulna. Yeah, I mean it does vary. I mean you're never going to get a massive quill knob for flying feather. Okay, um I've got I've got this question um from Matt. Um I was watching Apple TV's Prehistoric Planet and the scene where the Pachycephalosaurus flight fight before not flight.

[00:07:26]Pachycephalus fight and before charging >> That's a different I know.

[00:07:32]You'll be you'll be interested. Uh one scraped its foot on the floor much like a bull would. It struck me as a bit cartoonish and broke my immersion as my immediate thought was that's a mammal thing, signal that hoofed animals give before charging to um to predators or conspecifics. A dinosaur wouldn't do that. I discussed this with my fiance who suggested that it doesn't have to be a signal that's evolved in an ancestral ungulate, but just an outlet of an urge to charge that has become a signal wherever they are charging animals. This is further complicated by Wild Isles where black grouse were shown to scrape its foot before a fight with another male. However, I have considered that this was an editing trick and may not have been combat related. I'd love to hear your thoughts as I couldn't find much information about poring scraping in living animals, let alone extinct ones. Uh that is from Matt. So, Dave, what's your thought?

[00:08:24]Um I don't know. I haven't thought about it and I haven't seen that bit cuz as discussed previously, I hadn't seen all of Prehistoric Planet or BP2 and I don't remember that from BP1. Um maybe. I mean Yes, so the first thing to say is as we have said about Prehistoric Planet, however good it is, we don't you know, we don't know that much about dinosaur behavior. So, if you're going to not have very very very little content in your multiple hour-long documentaries across multiple series, you're going to have to put some stuff in there.

[00:08:59]And then the question becomes what's believable or reasonable. And whether it's believable or reasonable or not, if I go back to your original point, I think you're making a good point in dismissing it and going like, oh, well, it's a signal. So, why would that same signal evolve in Pachycephalosaurus?

[00:09:18]Well, the answer to that I'd flip that around and go, well, why wouldn't it? If you're a large bipedal animal with relatively little arms and it I'm not say I don't know enough about the poring activity of these things with charging.

[00:09:31]Let's Let's assume that it's I mean I know it does happen, but let's assume it's a real thing that is intended as a signal.

[00:09:39]If sending a signal is important for an animal capable of charging and delivering an injury, then we'd expect a signal to turn up in any kind of animal that's doing that or at least potentially turn up in any kind of doing that. That signal has probably evolved for a reason. Yeah, it is a warning. If you don't back down now, you're going to get hit. I want you to back down because however big a hit I'm capable of delivering, I might miss, I might lose, you're a predator who might eat me, I might lose this fight.

[00:10:09]Having you back down and me win is way better than me charging at you and body hits.

[00:10:17]That's probably true of pachycephalosaurs.

[00:10:20]So, why wouldn't they evolve some kind of signal to conspecifics or potential predator that a combat is about to occur or that you're building up to that threat, you know, the dog growling and then the hackles go up and the tail goes down and then the ears flatten and it goes up and up and up and then it kicks off. You know, that same kind of tearing of signals is totally, totally normal for this sort of thing.

[00:10:43]And yeah, if you're a pachycephalosaur, you can't do much with your arms, your dome is quite big, but you can't like toss it around like antlers like you're a moose or something and really display it. Maybe you could make some noise, but one thing you could do is potentially paw at the ground. So, I really don't think it's unrealistic or unreasonable.

[00:11:05]Um it would be weird, but stranger convergences have appeared between way more disparately related animals than these two.

[00:11:14]Well, I remember in an earlier episode you were saying that we do have evidence of dinosaurs scraping the ground. If it really is possibly mating >> air pod courtship, yeah, displays because yeah, and they are frighteningly similar to that to what we see in a whole bunch of modern seabirds.

[00:11:28]So, I reckon I reckon pachycephalosaurs and grouse, same thing.

[00:11:33]Yeah. There you go. Same thing. Why not?

[00:11:35]We hoped you enjoyed that little bite.

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