Since the 1930s, dinosaurs have rumbled, snarled and roared on film. But the fossilized inspirations for these cinematic characters have preserved little evidence for any such dramatic voices.

       In a paper published last week in the journal PeerJ, researchers announced the discovery of a fossilized herbivorous dinosaur from China preserving a surprisingly birdlike throat. It provides a clue that the origins of birdsong might go as far back as the beginning of dinosaurs themselves.

       The two-foot-long dinosaur, which the researchers named Pulaosaurus, was discovered in 163-million-year-old rocks in northeastern China, said Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author of the paper. The largely complete skeleton offers a strong anatomical view into the fleet-footed, beaked animal, an early member of the family that later produced “duck-billed” hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs.

       The Jurassic period formation that produced Pulaosaurus is also the source of other dinosaur discoveries like the feathered proto-bird Anchiornis, the tiny, batlike Yi qi and the feathered herbivorous dinosaur Tianyulong. Unlike those animals, Pulaosaurus is not preserved with obvious soft tissues that could help better explain its living appearance. “On some parts of the fossil we thought we’d found very thin filaments, but we can’t confirm that,” Dr. Xu said.

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       The team did note interesting formations in the stomach region of the fossil but hasn’t determined what those are. “They could be stomach contents — food eaten by this dinosaur, or organs, or maybe even eggs within the body,” Dr. Xu said.

       The most interesting remains were found within the throat. In vertebrates, vocal organs play an important role in protecting the airway and helping produce everything from simple hisses and grunts to speech. In most living reptiles, these tissues are composed of cartilage, and can produce simple bellows, grunts, groans and chirps. Modern birds have vocal organs made up partially of delicate bones, allowing them to make much more complicated sounds — including, in some cases, mimicking human speech.

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