If I were to ask you to imagine what a dinosaur sounds like, what would you picture? Chances are, it would be something along the lines of the mighty roars we hear in Jurassic Park. Believe it or not, the dinosaurs didn’t sound anything like what popular media tends to portray – their primitive vocalization methods weren’t advanced enough to make sounds like roars or screams. Instead, they likely would have made noises much closer to modern-day birds, especially ones with guttural vocalizations like Bitterns – at least, for the most part.

As a personal project, I thought it might be fun to create my own, more realistic dinosaur calls based on sounds made by modern day birds and reptiles using Reaper. The results can be heard below.

A great deal of research went into each and every one of these calls. I spent much time researching these dinosaurs and what we theorize their vocalizations were like. I would then look into what their closest living relatives are, and (more importantly) what modern-day animals have vocalizations close to what we think these dinos sounded like. I would then take the calls of these animals into Reaper, mash a few of them together, and modify them to create a more realistic interpretation of what these animals may have sounded like.