Jurassic Park Dinosaur Sounds Were Made In The Most Hilarious Way

By Rudie Obias | Updated 6 months ago

The Jurassic Park franchise has now been around for decades, growing and expanding on the dinosaur well beyond what anyone thought was imaginable, especially when it came out all the way back in 1993.

Even all of these years later, it’s always fun to look back at how the first Jurassic Park film brought the dinosaurs back to life, if only on the big screen.

An article on Vulture perfectly illustrates how Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer for the original Jurassic Park film, made the dinosaurs sound menacing and real.

Although no one knows what dinosaurs really sounded like millions of years ago, Rydstrom created some of their distinctive noises using recordings of animals having sex. Yes, those dinosaur roars you heard in the Jurassic Park movies were the sounds of animals getting it on!

Rydstrom explained about his Jurassic Park dinosaur sounds, “It’s somewhat embarrassing, but when the Raptors bark at each other to communicate, it’s a tortoise having sex.”

“It’s a mating tortoise! I recorded that at Marine World … the people there said, ‘Would you like to record these two tortoises that are mating?’ It sounded like a joke, because tortoises mating can take a long time. You’ve got to have plenty of time to sit around and watch and record them.”

Of course, Rydstrom didn’t only record animals for Jurassic Park when they were feeling frisky. He also recorded sounds of various creatures animals reacting to certain things, or getting angry. The sound of Jurassic Park‘s fierce Tyrannosaurus Rex actually came from one of the smallest (and cutest) animals on the planet. Rydstrom recorded the sounds of his Jack Russell terrier, Buster, and slowed it way down.

Rydstrom continued about his Jurassic Park sounds, “The way they animated the T. Rex was very doglike, especially when it grabs the Gallimimus and the lawyer and shakes them to death. Every day I would see my dog playing with the rope toy and doing exactly that, pretending like he’s killing his prey.’

He continued, “In Terminator 2, I recorded the sound of Buster eating puppy chow, and that became the crunch when the T-1000 spiked that guy’s eye socket.”

Gary Rydstrom won two Academy Awards for sound design and sound mixing for his work on Jurassic Park in 1993. Over the years, Rydstrom was nominated 17 times, winning a total of seven Academy Awards for Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

It’s easy to see why he was so acclaimed over the course of his career. The willingness and ability to think outside the box when it came to the Jurassic Park sound effects is one of the main reasons the movie was so good. And it’s a big reason the flick still stands up today.