If dinosaurs could sing.

Paleontologists have teamed up with computer scientists in an attempt to recreate the call of Parasaurolophus, an unusual dinosaur with a head shaped something like a trombone.

Arching backward from the skull of this 75-million-year-old herbivore was a 4.5-foot-long hollow crest. Researchers interpret the crest as a display device and possibly as a resonating chamber to produce sounds.

Robert Sullivan of the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg discovered a new specimen of Parasaurolophus in New Mexico last summer during an expedition with Thomas E. Williamson of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. The fossil is only the fourth reasonably complete example of a Parasaurolophus known.

The two paleontologists took a CT scan of the skull, hoping to image the internal structure of tubes looping through the crest. To their surprise, they found between 9 and 11 chambers, twice what earlier studies had indicated.

Because the skull was partially crushed, the paleontologists have had trouble discerning how the internal conduits connected. To interpret the CT data, they have enlisted the aid of computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. Using special image-processing algorithms, the Sandia scientists hope to resolve the hidden anatomy of Parasaurolophus. They can then make computer simulations of the sound waves that the animal may have generated with its resonant skull.