Which animals were used to make the sounds the velociraptors communicate with in the movie ‘Jurassic Park’?

Thankfully, we can only imagine what dinosaurs must have sounded like. In ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993), the intelligent velociraptors appear to have their own language. Now it turns out that it was the language of love; the raptor’s screech is actually the sound of tortoises mating.

The film’s sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, said “If people knew where the sounds in Jurassic Park came from, it’d be rated R!” Rydstrom recorded the mating tortoises at Marine World, and said that crafting sounds for the film was challenging. It was necessary to create dozens of distinct “dinosaur” noises from scratch, since, obviously, no one really knew what the extinct animals sounded like. His solution was to spend months recording animal noises (some exotic, some not) then tweaking those homegrown sounds to create something otherworldly. Other raptor noises were borrowed from animals many know well; for example, geese, whose sounds are used whenever the raptor makes a hissing noise, and horses, used when the raptor is breathing against the kitchen window.

The velociraptors were not the only ones with voices borrowed from modern species. In many cases, Rydstrom simply took a normal animal sound and slowed it down. The squeals of the Gallimimus flock, and that of the one which was eaten, were from a female horse in heat. The roar of the Tyrannosaurus came from a baby elephant; the crunching sounds it made as it ate, were his tiny Jack Russell terrier, Buster, eating puppy chow.