Right noises? ‘Jurassic World’ guesses on dinosaur sounds, experts say

The new “Jurassic World” movie trailer features growling, grunting and shrieking dinosaurs. These bellows may make for good entertainment at theaters, but do paleontologists actually know how dinosaurs sounded? Not really. The modern descendants of the dinosaurs - birds and crocodiles - vocalize in vastly different ways. Birds make noise with their syrinx, a vocal organ in the trachea that has two branches. The branches can vibrate with different frequencies at the same time, allowing birds to “sing” two different notes simultaneously. In contrast, crocodiles can make growling rumbles even though they don’t have vocal cords. Their young can even make noises before they hatch from their eggs, research shows. So, besides the entertaining - but wildly speculative - dinosaur growls and roars in Hollywood, it’s unclear how dinosaurs sounded, the researchers say.

If they [Hollywood] based it just on what we know [about] dinosaurs, it would be a pretty boring movie.

Mark Norell, the chair of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City

Science