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A mouthful of giant, crunchy teeth could be the scariest thing of a dinosaur. But there is something about the image of a wet, waggling Tyrannosaurus language that is particularly disturbing. To our great relief, the researchers found that most dinosaur languages, including the powerful T. rex, could not move much at all.
In a recent study, researchers compared fossilized hyoid bones – a horseshoe-shaped bone that anchors the tongue and supports opening in your lungs – with those of crocodiles and birds, the closest relatives dinosaurs. The study has led to unexpected results, mainly, that most representations of dino languages in popular culture are false. For some reason (maybe because Tyrannosaurus translated into "tyrant lizard" in Greek), many drawings show dinosaurs with long lizard-shaped tongues. But this new research reveals that most had crocodile-like languages, flat and rooted in the back of the mouth.
"The surprising part we found was that most of the hyoid bones of dinosaurs are pretty boring," says Julia Clarke, paleontologist and co-author of the study published this week in PLOS A. "The evidence really pleads for a simple and limited language movement in most dinosaurs."
But why think of a smooth and fleshy organ if we do not have to do it? What's so great about a language? Without language, we would not be able to chew, talk or swallow. Frogs rely on their tongue to swallow air. The okapi, also known as the zebra giraffe, uses its long 14-inch tongue to clean its eyes and remove leaves from trees.
And according to Clarke's research, there are many other tales that an old bone of the tongue can tell, such as the origin of the flight. Unlike the chunky and simple hyoid bone seen in dinosaurs like the T. rex, researchers have discovered a much more complex structure in dinosaurs resembling pterosaur birds, or "winged lizards".
The scene of the waterfall in The Lost World: Jurassic Park shows Julianne Moore being licked by a rex (fast forward to 2:30). We now know that such a lick would not have been possible.
"We wanted to know when this crazy evolution of the bones' languages occurred," says Clarke. "Only after the origin of the flight [in vertebrates] do you get these Olympians moving the bone tongue. "
If the languages have not slipped you before, they will probably do it now. Yes, that innocent-looking tongue in a cheerful, chirping bird has a bone in it. The hyoid bone of today's birds extends from the back of the throat up to the tip of the tongue. It's this flexible bone that allows the birds to pull out their tongue (and maybe even a little further). Hummingbirds have hyoids that are so long that they wrap around the skull and rest in the nostrils of birds. When she is unleashed, the bony tongue of a hummingbird can extend twice as long as its beak.
Noting the same structure in pterosaurs, the researchers say that it is likely that the evolution of bone language and theft are connected. When the arms evolved into wings, the flying dinosaurs lost the ability to catch their prey. Clarke says that these advanced languages could have been used as a new means of obtaining food, a characteristic also seen in modern birds.
A T. rex language It's certainly not comparable to our own pink pokers, but it's similar in its construction, made not of bone, but of thick tissue and muscle. Because its hyoid bone is essentially two, short stems that rest in the throat, the tongue was moored at the bottom of the mouth, making it impossible to throw it free like a bird's flexible bony tongue.
There was a quirk in the study that Clarke could not explain. Armored dinosaurs – like a stegosaurus or ankylosaurus – also had complex hyoids, even though they were very different animals from winged dinosaurs. Clarke says she's also unsure for what purpose the rooted language of a T. rex would have served, but based on observations of crocodiles – who have a similar simple hyoid bone – it had something to do with food. A flat tongue certainly makes sense for a crocodile, which swallows all its prey – a long bony tongue would probably interfere with that. Or maybe the tongue was still meant to be a landing strip for the bright blue birds that pick up the meat remnants of the fangs. In one way or another, languages can tell us much more than we thought.
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