What Jurassic Park's Dinosaurs Were Actually Made Of

When Jurassic Park hit theatres in June 1993, no one in the audience knew what a dinosaur sounded like. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom, working at Skywalker Sound, did not either. Paleontologists could only point him at the closest living relatives — birds and crocodilians — and tell him to invent the rest.

Rydstrom's method was layering. The Tyrannosaurus roar that pins Lex and Tim in the jeep is built from a single trumpeting baby elephant recorded at the San Francisco Zoo, slowed and bent down an octave, blended with the rumble of an alligator and the growl of a tiger. The breath through the T. rex's nostrils as it sniffs the water cup belongs to a horse.

The velociraptors are stranger. The most disturbing sound in the film — the long, communicative chirp the raptors use to coordinate before the kitchen scene — is two tortoises mating, recorded at Marine World. Rydstrom has said this on the record, repeatedly, and audiences laugh every time. Their excited barks are agitated geese. The throaty growls in the kitchen mix dolphin and walrus.

The brachiosaurs in the meadow scene, with the long calls that make grown adults tear up, are mostly slowed donkey and whale. The dilophosaur — the one that hisses at Dennis Nedry before killing him — is rattlesnakes, mating swans, and a hawk.

What Rydstrom understood is that audiences will accept any animal sound as right if the picture is anchored. So the Jurassic Park dinosaurs sound like dinosaurs. They are also, if you listen closely, a small zoo doing its actual everyday work, recorded carefully and reassembled.