Field Notes
Parasaurolophus
Say it: pa-ra-SORE-oh-LOAF-us
It means near-crested lizard. Late Cretaceous, about seventy-five million years ago, in what is now Utah, New Mexico and Alberta. Thirty-odd feet long and about as heavy as two cars, walking on four legs and running on two. Holly is a big one.
The crest is a tube, and the tube is folded
It is not a horn, and it is certainly not a snorkel — there is no hole in the end of it, so an animal breathing through it underwater would drown. Cut a Parasaurolophus crest open and you find the animal's own nose passages running all the way up the inside, turning round at the top and coming all the way back down again. The crest itself is about as long as your arm and a grown-up's arm together — four and a half feet — and the tube folded up inside it is nearly twice that. Scientists put a real skull through a hospital scanner, built the shape of the empty space inside a computer, and made the shape make a sound. It was low. About a B-flat — the second note up from the bottom of a piano, and around thirty shakes of the air a second. Low notes travel further than high ones, which is why you would hear one of these long before you saw anything, and why a mile is a modest guess.
Babies had almost no crest, and it grew
A young one has a small bump over its nose. A half-grown one has a curved lump. An adult has a tube most of the length of a canoe paddle. A longer tube makes a lower note, so the note probably changed as the animal got older — which would mean a herd of these did not sound like one voice. The young ones would be higher and the old ones lower, and every animal out there could hear how big the animal calling it was.
How we know
In 2009 a high-school student on a museum field trip in Utah spotted a piece of bone sticking out of a hillside, and it turned out to be the most complete baby Parasaurolophus anybody has ever found. The museum nicknamed him Joe. He is about six feet long, he was under a year old, and the top of his head is the whole reason we know what the crest is doing while it is still growing.
What we made up. Holly answering a bell before first light. Holly counting kids. Holly choosing anybody. The size is real, the folded tube is real, the low note is real, and the fact that she never roars is real — nothing in this book roars, because roaring is a thing mammals do.
This page is printed at the back of The Long Note, one of ten. Copy it, print it, read it out in a classroom — that is what it is for.