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To: cAPSLOCK who wrote (1661)	12/8/1997 10:04:00 PM
From: M. M. Jones	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4736

December 5, 1997 Scientists Re-Create Dinosaur Call -------------------------------------------------------- A.P. INDEXES: TOP STORIES \| NEWS \| SPORTS \| BUSINESS \| TECHNOLOGY \| ENTERTAINMENT -------------------------------------------------------- Filed at 5:32 p.m. EST By The Associated Press ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- The cry of a duck-billed dinosaur reverberated for the first time in more than 70 million years Friday -- a low-pitched, trombone wail that listeners felt as much as they heard. With a little literary license and a lot of computing power, a Sandia National Laboratories scientist and a paleontologist recreated the song of the Parasaurolophus. It was played at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. ''It sounds a little out of this world, like a giant clearing his throat,'' said Tom Williamson, the museum paleontologist who worked on the project. ''It's the kind of sound that would easily be heard by other animals through a thick rain forest.'' Williamson and computer scientist Carl Diegert worked for two years recreating the sound by using a Parasaurolophus skull unearthed in northwestern New Mexico in 1995 by Williamson and Robert Sullivan of the State Museum of Pennsylvania. Scientists have long been puzzled by the shape of the dinosaur's skull, which has a 4-foot-long crest rising from the back of the head and a complex network of nasal passages running through it. Williamson and Diegert took a CT scan of the skull and fed the data into Sandia computers to reconstruct the structure of the air chambers within the crest. The computer model led to the reproduction of possible sounds bouncing through the air passages. Because paleontologists don't know whether Parasaurolophus had vocal cords, Williamson and Diegert simulated sounds that the dinosaur could have made both with or without a voice box. ''People have tried to do this before with the same kind of dinosaur, but those were based on very simple plastic models,'' Williamson said. ''Those were studied without an understanding of what the internal morphology of the crest was like.'' Diegert and Williamson believe the dinosaurs' sounds would have been so distinctive that the animals could have identified each other. ''If these animals are able to make sounds, then it suggests that they are using these sounds for some kind of communication -- a fairly sophisticated social behavior,'' Williamson said. An exhibit on the Parasaurolophus fossil -- complete with a voice box visitors can activate to hear the dinosaur's cry -- opens at the museum Saturday. Diegert said he hopes the same computer methods could someday solve many other paleontological mysteries. ''I see these computers as something of a time machine for looking into the past,'' he said. ********************************************** nmmnh-abq.mus.nm.us ********************************************** HAR DE HAR HAR HAR!