What the Squawk?

A video hit my timeline a little while ago. It comes from earlier in the year. The main idea is summed up in this little Vine:

In typical lack-of-nuance reporting, a lot of people took this to mean that all dinosaurs were incapable of vocalization, and instead relied on syrinx to create sounds more like modern day birds do. Instead, if you read the conclusion of the report (or watch this video about it), you'll see that we're not talking about dinosaurs qua dinosaurs, but instead the branch of dinosaurs that filled a different evolutionary niche that survived the K-T extinction (and all the history of dinosaurs that came before it).

Science on a straight line. Clear as can be. Found here.

I like to think of it as working on an address, but backwards. The address of my house would be the far right of that diagram above ("Living birds")--very specific, easily observable. Then we have the road on which my house resides, which is connected to a larger thoroughfare, which runs through a city. Calling me a resident of my city ("Dinosauria") is accurate, but you could also be more specific by saying which thoroughfare I live near ("Dromaeosaurs"), or even where my road and another connect ("Archaeopteryx"). None of the address is incorrect, but some is more accurate than others.

When it comes to birds, they're descended from theropod dinosaurs, which were bipedal, predominantly carnivorous (the Therozinosaurus and its kin being a notable exception), and boast the most popular dinosaurs, including Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus. Did they have feathers? Yes and no. I mean, like respectively. I don't think there's enough evidence to support T. rex having feathers as an adult--mostly due to the cube volume rules, which mean the larger something gets, the harder it is to wick away heat. Smaller animals, like the Velociraptor and other dromeasaurids, had feathers because they would have helped their metabolism remain balanced. Some could have kept feathers as a communication tool, mating benefits, or vestigial components. Whatever the case, it seems highly unlikely--from the evidence we have right now--that behemoths like Brachiosaurus or Triceratops were feathered. The only argument for me that holds some weight is the idea that whatever that archosaur--the basal dinosaur, if you will--that kicked off Dinosauria was had feathers, and therefore all dinosaurs had that trait. But without that clear connection of a feathered ancestor, the best we have is conjecture without evidence.

On a personal level, I don't want a fluffy T. rex or a feathery Triceratops.

Uh, no thank you, Mr. Webpage. 

My preference, of course, doesn't matter. Only what evidence we can get matters. And since this essay isn't about feathers, but squawking, maybe we should look at that evidence?

What can we know about their vocalizations? At this point, it's very hard to say. There's little support for them roaring...or not roaring, as it turns out. Point is, we can't be sure, since soft tissues are incredibly hard to fossilize.

Fossilized skin impression, which is obviously scaly but not fully reptilian. Thanks, Pinterest!

But we also have brains...

The New York Times has brains!

...and poop.

If anyone says Wikipedia is full of crap...they're technically right.

These and other trace fossils help us to reconstruct how the animal behaved, its abilities, and, in some cases, even what color its skin was. These are all pieces of the puzzle, but each has to be taken with qualifications and specifications. For example, I heard of one coprolite (fossilized poo) that was taken to be from a T. rex simply because, why not? There was evidence of other bones inside of it--so it was definitely a carnivore's stool--but the final idea that it had to be T. rex was simply because that was more interesting and as equally plausible as other candidates. And finding one dinosaur's brain doesn't mean we have all dinosaur brains figured out.

Which leads me back to the goose idea. Where the actual shift from dinosaur to bird happened is less material here than the idea that there were, at the same time, dinosaurs and the line of animals that became modern-day birds. In fact, birds had a very high survival rate after the K-T extinction, because their adaptations were varied enough from the distant dinosaur cousins to allow them to survive the prolonged upheaval of the entire ecosystem collapsing planetwide. Syrinx-toting birds obviously survived the extinction that wiped out almost 80% of animal life on the planet. But that doesn't mean that the dinosaurs who lived with them also had syrinxes. Only finding syrinxes in fossilized remains would let us know that, and then it would only let us know that that specific species and genus had a syrinx.

These birds, to go back to my original analogy, also came from the same city as my house: That is, they're part of that same line. However, they lived in a different section of town and lived different lives. We're close, but not the same.

To think that the modern-day adaptations were the same as dinosaur and other protoavian adaptations is, in a lot of ways, sensationalism. It may actually prove true someday, but it has to be proven before it should be taken for fact. And while funny videos of dinosaurs squawking might give you some chuckles and the creator some clicks, they aren't necessarily reporting the issue correctly.