Dinosaur vocalizations revisited

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

To communicate is to signal. I have often wondered if the spikes and various other ornaments on armoured dinosaurs (some sauropods, all ankylosaurs) could have been covered with waxy layers of hydrocarbons and fatty acids for protection against desiccation and microorganisms. Could these chemical compounds have acted as signals for recognition or behavioural cues? Consider/speculate, if you will: a dinosaur herd (ceratopsians trying to cross a river, stalked by tyrannosaurs, submerged crocodylomorphs functioning much as they do today) would communicate via feedback loops to sustain their social homeostasis. Interindividual dinosaur communication would, in eusocial systems of herds, be replaced by "mass" communication, and it is not difficult to conceive of dinosaur herds, due to their social intricacies and size, having a wide array of signal repertoire. Thus, a young dinosaur would!
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earn to distinguish between the multimodalities of  "noise" and "signal", and to communicate...meaning, dinosaurs communicating possessed syntax. Perhaps, even how a nest was constructed and looked to other dinosaurs, was a medium for transmission of signals? If, as I suspect, sauropods used infrasonic communications as to elephants, then a young dinosaur would learn how to distinguish between specific and anonymous recognition systems within their social group as contrasted to the "mass" communication of a larger, migrating population. Recognition among individual dinosaurs would be specific in a small group so that, in a network of large dinosaur societies (the migrating herds), they could recognize their own family units.