By Yuan Ren For Mailonline
Published: 17:01 GMT, 18 March 2019 | Updated: 22:20 GMT, 18 March 2019
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Dinosaurs could have sensed sound as sharply as birds, making them even better hunters than previously believed.
The process used by birds to hear has been detected in alligators, which are the closest living relative to the dinosaur.
It could means that T-rex and other carnivore dinosaurs identified the location of prey with their ears as much as their eyes.
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Alligators process sound in the same way as birds - and could have gotten the trait from a shared ancestor the dinosaur, a new study reveals
An owls' sense of hearing is so sharp it can hear a mouse moving around under a covering of snow.
Birds are exceptionally good at creating neural maps of the location of where sounds originated.
These maps of where the sound came from uses a technique called the 'interaural time difference'.
In a study of American alligators, scientists found that the reptiles build neural maps of sound in the same way birds do.
Animals process the tiny differences in time it takes a sound to reach each ear to work out where it has come from.
This is known as the interaural time difference and different animals process them in different ways.
To study how alligators identify where sound comes from the researchers anaesthetised 40 alligators and fitted them with earphones. They played tones for the sleepy reptiles and measured the response of a structure in their brain stems called the nucleus laminaris.
Little was previously known about how alligators do this, but new evidence suggests that reptiles form neural maps in the same way as birds.
This suggests the hearing strategy existed in their common ancestor - the dinosaurs, say scientists.
Smaller dinosaurs would also have benefited from sharp hearing by being better able to escape predators.
Most research into how animals analyse interaural time difference has focused on physical features such as skull size and shape.
Lead author on the study Professor Catherine Carr from the University of Maryland believed it was
