28 Days Of Dinosauria - 19

Day 19: Parasaurolophus walkeri was a hadrosaurid, a family of dinosaurs that tended to go in for head ornaments. In the case of Parasaurolophus, this meant a long, hollow crest that was connected to the nasal passages, and thus seems to have been capable of producing noise. This rather suggests that Parasaurolophus went about hooting a lot. The crests should have been capable of making different noises (alarm-raising, parental communication with young, mating displays, etc), and you can hear a recreation here.

The hadrosaurids were herbivorous, and seem to have travelled in herds. They've been called "the cattle of the Cretaceous" due to their ubiquity, and they seem to have been a major part of the diet of a lot of large, Cretaceous carnivores. Parasaurolophus (North America, c. 75 million years ago) would presumably have been no exception, although at ten metres long it would have been no pushover. It's easy to imagine them living in herds, co-operating to protect their young, and hooting at each other as they went about their business. Due to the vast number of hadrosaurids that existed, they're fairly well known in the fossil record (including skin impressions and even preserved soft tissue). This helps to make the family as a whole much better known to science than some of their fellow dinosaurs. Parasaurolophus fossils are scarcer than those of some other hadrosaurs, but general similarities in the family at large help to give a pretty good picture of how they lived.