Dinosaurs Don’t Actually Sound Anything Like They Do In Jurassic Park
Dinosaurs mostly cooed instead of roared like they do in Jurassic Park.
Back when Jurassic Park was thought up, the producers of the movie decided to create a brand-new sound for their dinosaurs. Yes, what we are hearing in that movie, especially with the mighty roar of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is completely fabricated. In fact, dinosaurs sounded much more like birds, as they are the deeper ancestors of our feathery friends.
The reasoning behind Jurassic Park creating these sounds was simply because the evidence brought on by paleontology had not yet been advanced enough to understand what dinosaurs sounded like. Also, the noises heard from the iconic scream of the T. Rex from the movie are certainly far more threatening than hearing a coo come from such a mighty beast. The making of the movie was detailed in The Making of Jurassic Park: An Adventure 65 million Years in the Making book, which indicates the T. Rex roar was a combination of sounds from a baby elephant, alligator, and tiger.
Even stranger is that the noises of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were made from the noises of tortoises having sex, which is equal parts odd and confusing. Still, most dinosaurs weren’t able to vocalize much of anything, apart from the coo sound that a bird would make. This evidence was discovered around 2016 when a fossil of a bird was discovered, which would have lived around the same time as the dinosaurs.
This bird fossil had a preserved syrinx, though most of the dinosaurs that existed then did not have any discernable preserved syrinx. This would mean that the dinosaurs that weren’t avian based did not possess the vocal capabilities to roar or do much of anything apart from possibly cooing. This wasn’t the case for all dinosaurs, as the Hadrosaur has that long bill on the top of its head, which was likely used as their way of communicating.
Still, most dinosaurs did not have that type of bone structure or anatomy to allow for them to roar in the same way we have seen in Jurassic Park. Though most people associate a dinosaur with sounding like this massively disturbing beast, they would have mostly only been able to produce low frequencies that humans could not pick up. Instead, the data shows that we would have felt the rumblings in our bodies, rather than heard something like a powerful scream.
Dinosaurs may not have been able to screech out loud, but they would have been cooing and communicating with low-frequency hums of sorts. Granted, those hums would have been coming from animals that were massive and would have likely shaken the ground beneath you.
Movies always take creative liberties and without making the T. Rex sound as frightening as it had in Jurassic Park, that movie would have never worked. We do understand that seeing this massive lizard running at you is going to be scary enough, but if it had been cooing, that fear might have been lessened by a lot. Still, dinosaurs look threatening, and we would not want to have to be running from something as massive as a T. Rex.
