Musician and researcher Courtney Brown has been investigating the sounds produced by long-dead dinosaurs. The goal of the project was to produce a strange musical instrument that was effectively a dinosaur head.
The project focused on Hadrosaurs, known for massive echo chambers on the top of their heads. It’s been theorized that these chambers were used to resonate sound waves to produce specific calls for the species.
The work required CT scans of a fossilized Hadrosaur skull, which would reveal the inner structures. One huge challenge was that fossils tend to be flattened over time, and the geometry had to be adjusted to its proper shape.
What’s a Hadrosaur? Brown explains:
“A Corythosaurus is a duck-billed dinosaur, lambeosaurine hadrosaur that scientists hypothesize used its large head crest and nasal passages for vocal call resonation. The Corythosaurus is native to Alberta, Canada, and lived in the late Cretaceous, around 75-77 million years ago. Thus, they lived around 15 million years before the KT extinction event which eradicated the non-avian dinosaurs. As adults, they are around 8-9 meters long.”
The resulting 3D model was printed, apparently on Prusa desktop FFF 3D printers, and assembled into a life-size replica of the Hadrosaur skull.
Once complete, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as blowing into the skull. It turns out that dinosaurs likely did not have a larynx as mammals do, but instead use a different mechanism called a syrinx.
Brown and team built a replica syrinx and attached it to the base of the skull as it would have been in real life. They then composed software that would observe a “Dino musician”, who would use mouth and breath action to drive the syrinx.
Air would then be pushed through the syrinx and through the Hadrosaur skull, resulting in the most unusual sounds. These are possibly the sounds actually made by Hadrosaurs. Amazingly, the human can control the types of sounds produced using this method.
This is the most amazing 3D print project. Brown explains:
“Our breath becomes the dinosaur’s breath. In a sense, the dinosaur instrument becomes a part of us, the same way a musical instrument becomes part of musicians as we play.”
I’ve seen many 3D print applications that help us understand history in different ways, but this application actually enables you to directly participate in recreating an ancient world lost a long time ago.
