The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are farmyard animals
Nobody has ever heard a dinosaur. When Jurassic Park arrived in 1993 with creatures that roared, snorted and called to one another with unnerving realism, every one of those sounds had to be invented, and the sound designer Gary Rydstrom built them out of ordinary living animals, recorded at zoos and wildlife parks.
The Tyrannosaurus rex, the film’s thunderous star, is a blend. Its roar mixes the trumpet of a baby elephant, the growl of a tiger and the low rumble of an alligator, and Rydstrom folded in the bark of his own Jack Russell terrier, a dog named Buster, for extra bite. The gentle Brachiosaurus, the long-necked giant, sings in the slowed-down brays of donkeys. The frilled Dilophosaurus that spits venom was voiced in part by swans.
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And then there are the velociraptors, the film’s real nightmares, hunting in packs and chattering to each other in clicks and barks that sound eerily like a language. That intelligent communication, the most chilling sound in the whole film, is tortoises mating.
Rydstrom has told the story with some embarrassment. He had gone to a marine park with his recording gear to capture other animals, heard the noise that mating tortoises make, and realised it was exactly right. One practical bonus, he noted dryly, is that tortoises take a very long time about it, so there was no shortage of material to record. The raptors’ vocal range was rounded out with the hisses of geese and other creatures, but the core of their menace is a slow reptilian romance.
None of this is a shortcut or a cheat. It is how almost all creature sound works: real, textured recordings of living throats, then layered, pitched and slowed until the ear accepts them as something that has been extinct for millions of years. The next time a raptor makes your skin crawl, remember that you are listening, at heart, to a couple of tortoises having a very nice afternoon.