Jurassic melodies

Come and join a dinosaur choir! That's an invitation that any music-lover would surely want to take up: who could give up the chance to sit next to a velociraptor or T-Rex and put together a Messiah from scratch?

- MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN

Which, admittedly, might get rather messy if the animals got bored with the Hallelujah Chorus and determined to do what they do best and started to devour their fellow singers.

Thankfully, that’s not what musician and scientist Courtney Brown has dreamt up in her new instrument, the Dinosaur Choir – and not only because there are no Jurassic Park-style DNA resurrections in sight. It’s also because the animal whose skull it is based upon is Corythosaurus, a species of ‘lambeosaurine hadrosaur’ that only ate plants and the occasional crustacean, despite growing to around nine metres in length, and which lived in what's now Canada c.75 million years ago. Phew.