A Lot Of Dinosaurs Couldn't Stick Out Their Tongues

Here's a big Nope-asaurus for ya: Reconstructions of most dinosaurs with their tongues out and wriggling like this guy's are wrong, according to a new study. (Credit: Spencer Wright) When it comes to fleshing out dinosaurs, so to speak, based on their nearest living relatives, paleontologists can look to birds or the crocodilians. But a new study says depicting most dinosaur tongues like those of birds with particularly mobile mouthpieces, well, that's just a crock. Tongues aren't much more than a hunk of mouth muscle without the hyoid apparatus, a group of bones that varies significantly between species and provides your mouthmeat with both an anchor and a kind of scaffolding that determines its position and range of motion. We puny humans are left with just a single hyoid bone, but many other animals have elaborate, highly specialized hyoid structures that adapted to exploit specific environments or diets. Take hummingbirds, for example. Their nectar-lapping tongues are spectacularly long and unroll from the bird's mouth to get the sweet stuff.