First, let me admit that my knowledge of dinosaurs is ancient – limited to the level of pre-1990 primary schoolchildren. Before DNA-based genetics, before machine learning, before all the palaeontology of the last forty years showed us more of how parts of the past might have looked.

Not so ancient, however, as the dinosaurs in my family’s copy of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, a pre-WW2 copy that has a strong Presbyterian bias in its writing, and betrays its early-20th-Century restrictions. Their entire history of Earth lasts only 72 million years, and life on the planet only half that, which means their dinosaurs don’t go extinct with the Chixculub asteroid because they didn’t exist until millions of years after.

The world ninety years ago was not just a copy of this with more horses and no television.

In part, my musings on dinosaurs have been piqued by watching the bird-life in my garden. Mostly eating the strawberries, I must admit. There’s a reason William Morris called his most popular pattern “The Strawberry Thief”…

I used to think all garden birds were much the same, and likewise waterfowl, all getting along with each other in their element and all scared of the same predators. Now, after actively watching for a few hours, I’m sure they’re not at all similar – in fact, there’s probably a difference between each variety of small garden birds as great as between us and chimpanzees, or humans and meerkats.

Robins and blackbirds and sparrows all fight over the bird-bath; robins and finches and tits all scrabble over the birdfeeder. I’ve seen coots peck at ducklings; geese and swans not so much fighting as edging round each other cautiously. But, ornithologist I amn’t.

Pigeons here seem to wake up about an hour after the other birds, as if they’re slow on the uptake, not morning people at all.

Before the sun’s properly up, light just pale at the eastern horizon, the wee birds start their magical song, warbling across the gardens behind the house. An hour later, asking where all the coffee went and is there any chance of having the newspaper now, the pigeons land on the roof of the shed without their slippers and start the day’s hoo-hoo-hooing.

Even the magpies don’t seem to like it – clattering loudly like pan-lids in a busy kitchen, or mediaeval milkmaids in pattens walking across the cobbled kail-yard to the cowshed.

Boom-boom, go the pigeons, a throaty signal they’ve spotted the kale. Down they drop into the vegetable patch, plodding around, head bobbing as they toddle back and forth.

Small birds swoop through the gaps to pick at beasties on the ground, or on the underside of leaves. The brassicas are tall enough now that the sparrows can’t shred the lowest leaves, and they’re too frit to hop higher.

I’ve placed wire netting over the brassica bed; the pigeons go hungry.

Another insight into my musings was provided by an image of a giant prehistoric penguin skeleton – “A Map for Our Tour of the Penguin Skeleton” on March of the Fossil Penguins – (https://fossilpenguins.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/a-map-for-our-tour-of-the-penguin-skeleton/).

The birds, and I presume this applies to modern-day penguins too (insert picture of Feathers McGraw here), have long necks that balance on top of a very muscular spine. If it wasn’t for all that blubber under their skin, they’d look more like gannets on their hind legs (yes, I know birds only have two legs, permit me this flight of fancy).

Now, follow me here… Once upon a time there were long-necked land dinosaurs, with feet – and more importantly, pelvises – that suggest they walked on all fours, in the same way as elephants and hippos. Waddled, in fact. With big heavy long tails to keep themselves balanced, so their long necks (the dinosaurs, not the hippos) could reach high into tree canopies for food – like giraffes – or deep underwater.

In the first Jurassic Park film we see how that food has (been imagined to) ended up on the other side of a dinosaur digestive system. (Another aside here – via botanist James Wong – avocados developed to be eaten whole by giant sloths, in handfuls, and the avocado pits/stones deposited in a pile of steaming fertiliser the like of which has not been seen since the giant sloths became extinct, which is why avocado stones often germinate in compost heaps, even in cold climates that an avocado tree can’t possibly survive…)

But we I don’t know how those any dinosaurs communicated with one another.

Popular science programmes like the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs – and many dinosaur films – show the meat-eating predator Tyrannosaurus rex roaring with the noise of a ten-ton lion in chain-mail fed through a wood-chipper. But crocodiles and alligators don’t roar like that: the closest description of the noise they make is a chirp. Or a tiny squeaky hinge that needs oiling.

What would herbivore dinosaurs have sounded like? Again, popular entertainment likes to suggest they sung like our more melodious birds, trilling a sweet chorus of many notes and charming butterflies out of the orchids. But only small birds sing like this. Larger birds produce more strident calls – consider the boom of a bittern, or the honking of geese, or the weird miaow of a peacock.

So, of all the possible voices for those big waddling dinosaurs, I suggest they might have sounded like wood pigeons.

Entirely conjecture on my part.

But I see images of Brontosaurus and Diplodocus all fleshed up and compare them to my backyard pigeons, and I see a direct link.

Imagine: pairs of lovesick, hungry Brontosaurus booming that hoo-hoo-hoo call across wide river valleys, waddling through thick tropical forests searching for giant kale, driving all the other dinosaurs bonkers. Especially at odd hours of the day.

The asteroid probably couldn’t come soon enough.

(Of course, now I’ve written this, I expect to find it reproduced as gospel by the various A I thieves across the internet… let me know if you spot it, won’t you? Although I’ll be mortified…)