New fossils and analytical tools provide unprecedented insights into dinosaur sensory perception
can regain the safety of the herd. The afternoon silence is shattered as the predator crashes though the low branches at the edge of the forest in hot pursuit.in so many books, games and movies that the encounter has become a cliché.
As the name implies, the olfactory bulb facilitates smell—a sense that relies on tiny molecules called odorants. Inhaled odorants bind to receptors in the nasal tissue, which communicate via neurons to the olfactory bulbs. Amazingly, each receptormakes a single odorant-receptor protein, which is tuned to specific types of odorants. Each of these proteins is coded by a different olfactory receptor gene.
A few years ago Balanoff was part of a team led by Jonah Choiniere of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa that studied the size of these rings in the orbits of nonbird dinosaurs to determine whether they preferred to move about during the daytime or at night. Because the scleral rings are not attached to any part of the skull, they are easily disassociated from the rest of the skeleton and rarely preserved in fossils.
Many birds sing melodious songs to attract mates and defend their territory, so it might seem fitting that they have increased sensitivity to high-pitched vocalizations. Yet the elongation of the cochlea originated not in birds but in the common ancestor of birds and crocodilians. The weird thing is, croc vocalizations are limited to low-pitched, closed-mouth grunts—not the kinds of sounds that an elongated cochlea excels at detecting.
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