Rare Pulaosaurus qinglong fossil suggests some dinosaurs may have sounded like birds and shared similar vocal anatomy

Picture yourself being chased by a T. rex, your heart is pounding, and then it chirps at you. Sounds absurd, right? Well, science is slowly making that scenario much more plausible. A newly discovered fossil is turning upside down what we thought we knew about the sounds dinosaurs made.

A little dinosaur with a big secret
Meet Pulaosaurus qinglong, a tiny, plant-eating dinosaur that roamed what’s now northeastern China about 163 million years ago. We're talking about the size of a medium dog, or about 28 inches long. Not the nightmare creature Hollywood has been selling to us for decades.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. According to a study published in the journal PeerJ, the fossil of Pulaosaurus was found nearly whole, and it kept something that paleontologists very rarely get to see: a bony voice box. The leaf-like structures inside its larynx look a lot like the ones seen in modern birds today. That’s a 163-million-year-old throat that may have been capable of producing true bird-like chirps and calls, not the earth-shaking roars we all grew up watching.


Why this finding is so significant
The thing about dinosaur sounds is that we have almost no direct evidence for them. Vocal organs are made of soft tissue and cartilage, which are not usually preserved during fossilization. So for most of dinosaur history, scientists have been pretty much guessing.

This fossil breaks that silence. Pulaosaurus is just the second non-avian dinosaur ever discovered with its bony vocalization structures preserved. The first was an armored dinosaur called Pinacosaurus grangeri whose larynx was described in a landmark paper in Communications Biology in 2023 by Yoshida, Kobayashi, and Norell. That study found that Pinacosaurus had a large, flexible larynx with features previously seen only in birds, and concluded it may have used that structure to produce bird-like vocalizations. Now, Pulaosaurus, which lived some 90 million years before Pinacosaurus, shows some of the same features, just in a less developed stage.

What Hollywood has been getting wrong
If you grew up watching Jurassic Park, you’ve been hearing dinosaurs wrong this whole time. Those earth-shaking roars? Almost certainly fiction. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom famously combined animal sounds to create the iconic T. rex bellow, but none of it was based on actual fossil evidence of how dinosaurs sounded.

The reality is much more complicated, and maybe even more fun. The larynx of modern reptiles is cartilaginous and produces sound. However, birds have a special bony organ called the syrinx, which allows complex layered vocalizations, think everything from a simple chirp to the elaborate song of a mockingbird. Dinosaurs, it seems, may have been evolving something in between. Not the syrinx of a songbird, not the silence of a lizard.

The mystery that remains
Scientists themselves are the first to admit how much there is still to learn. According to James Napoli, a vertebrate paleontologist at Stony Brook University, without fossilized vocal organs (which are extremely rare), it’s quite difficult to even start guessing the boundaries of dinosaur vocal behavior. No one can play you a recording of what Pulaosaurus sounded like anytime in the near future. The compression of the fossil makes it impossible to make exact acoustic calculations.

However, each such rare find adds yet another data point. Two different species of dinosaur. Two completely different branches of the family tree. Both have bird-like throat anatomy. That’s the type of evidence that slowly rewrites the textbooks.

What it tells us about our view of the dinosaurs
This is a real paradigm shift for millennials and Gen Z, who grew up on Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time. Those monsters we were afraid of as kids may have sounded more like the birds outside your window than any monster movie sound effect.

It’s also a clue that paleontology is not finished yet. Every new fossil can turn the story on its head. Sometimes the most surprising finds come from the smallest, most unlikely creatures, like a two-foot-long Jurassic herbivore that may have spent its days quietly chirping through the ancient forest.