Noisy hadrosaurs

Cross-posted from DA. I thought I ought to put this in my blog, too.

I was reading this lady’s blog post about her flock of guinea fowl. She mentions that whenever a fox or something tries to snatch a guinea or a chicken, the guineas gang up on it and scream at it until it runs away. She hasn’t lost a single bird since she got her guineas.

I was thinking about that and laughing to myself about it. I used to have one guinea, and she was freaking loud all by herself.

So then I started thinking about hadrosaurs. You know, the duckbilled kind.

They had almost no way to defend themselves. No claws, no plate armor, no spikes, and they couldn’t run particularly fast. All they had was their funky crests full of chambers and tubes. Some people have even speculated that some of those chambers had combustible chemicals inside, like the bombardier beetle has, to let them breathe puffs of fire at predators.

But I was thinking about that guinea story. What if hadrosaurs were just so freaking LOUD that they could chase off most predators?

Think about it. They moved and nested in herds of hundreds and hundreds of animals. Say some carnivorous critter comes a-sneaking out of the woods, and the nearest duckbill starts shouting about it. Immediately twenty or so others run up, and they all stamp and shout and scream. Animals that size, with headgear to amplify the noise, would probably shake the ground and deafen the predator. Predators, in general, don’t like being found out and shouted at. Nine times out of ten, they could probably run off just about anything that dared sneak up on them.

I’d love to draw a bunch of them shouting down a tiger, for some reason. And the tiger is all bunched up, the way cats do when you surprise them.