Researching dinosaurs online recently (as you do) we were fascinated to find there’s solid scientific guesswork for what an actual T. Rex sound was.

The January 2018 BBC programme The Real T Rex, hosted by Chris Packham, had a stab at creating the kind of guttural noise the Tyrannosaurus made during the Upper Cretaceous period 68 to 66 million years ago.

More than 40 specimens of T. Rex have been discovered around the world, which has enabled palaeontologists to piece together the potential eerie noises they did make. Earphones ready for this one, please! 🎧

Insights on the Weird T. Rex Real Sound That’d Make You Brick it One

If the above is even halfway near accurate it’s the first time a T. Rex noise has been heard on Earth in 66 million years

Professor Julia Clark, a palaeontologist, created this sound through the modern understanding of voice boxes and syrinxes alongside close examination of T. Rex skulls and the formation of their inner ears.

Professor Clark used Archosaurs to replicate the noise. She used a Eurasian Bittern bird and Chinese crocodile, combined them, and ramped up the effect to match a 12 foot by 40 foot monstrosity like the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

This is in comparison to how Steven Spielberg’s landmark Jurassic Park (1993) depicted the giant beasts. This is the noise commonly associated with them and what many people would consider the real T. rex roar.

As you’ll have guessed, that noise (which sounds like a massive truck grinding to a halt) isn’t accurate.

Obviously, that was all for entertainment purposes. The series took a lot of creative liberties with these creatures. For example, the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were depicted as the most dangerous animals humanly imaginable.

In reality, they were more like an overgrown chicken.

But Dr. Clark’s work shows we can make an educated guess on what these enormous beasts sounded like. And the YouTube channel StudioMod went a step further with audio efforts. The channel creator had this to say about their process:

“[It’s] an ongoing study utilizing the most recent scientific data on dinosaur vocalizations. Sounds are produced by myself and digitally workshopped from modern non-syrinx based avian reptiles. Using skull and olfactory cavity proportions, one can attempt to recreate the flow of sound, frequency, and volume of each animal. Much study is required for each particular species, and often several phases are trashed due to general unlikelyhood. The final results are based on acute representations of what sounds would be most comfortable and base-line for each animal. Video also includes 2 marine reptiles and a pterosaur, even though both are much more difficult to produce accurately.”

It advances on Dr. Clark’s work and has a wider variety of low frequency noises, with the results being on the rather scary side. Was this an actual T. Rex sound?

Right, the main takeaway from us is this—goddamn terrifying. As humans we know if you hear something like that to steer well bloody clear of it.

Birdsong has been used extensively to work out the T. Rex actual sound. As explained on Dinosaur Culture in recreating what dinosaurs sounded like:

“By looking at birds we can see what vocal structures evolved from dinosaurs, and by looking at Crocodilians we can get a partial glimpse at what came before dinosaurs. Combining them together, then scaling the sound up to match the size of the massive Tyrannosaurus Rex, Professor Clark has given us the best look, er, sound of what the world’s largest land carnivore sounded like!”

Knowledge of these ancient creatures has advanced considerably since the days of Jurassic Park and other film depictions, such as the famous scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

The T. Rex also looked a lot different to how the films portray them.

The scientific paper Theropod dinosaur facial reconstruction and the importance of soft tissues in paleobiology (2023) published in the Science journal found:

“Complete coverage of theropod dinosaur teeth with extraoral tissues (gingiva and labial scales) is both plausible and consistent with patterns observed in living ziphodont amniotes’.”

In other words, the Jurassic Park look of teeth overlaying lower jaw in threatening fashion… the stuff of movies!

Returning to Chris Packham’s documentary, he told The Guardian in an attempt at a truthful Tyrannosaurus:

“New technology means that within palaeontology we are now learning a lot more, a lot more quickly than ever before. And we have more specimens to study, which are better prepared and more widely accessible to researchers. The science has enjoyed rapid spurts of evolution but at the moment we really are in a renaissance period. Sometimes the dissemination of information between scientist and the public is slow … I wanted to “fast track” this for what we know about T. rex – that’s why we went straight to the palaeontologists with their papers firmly on the pulse of this animal.”

The show marked a century of research on the Tyrannosaurus. And keep in the mind the first dinosaur discovered was only in 1819, when a Megalosaurus received a scientific description.

That was after British fossil hunter William Buckland unearthed the bones and later named them in 1824. In the grand scheme of human history, that’s barely anything for proper research and the like.

It’s not surprising lots of myths have sprung up about the likes of T. Rex, furthered by their popularity at the movies.

But it’s welcome to see a detailed look into what the T. rex real sound may have been, based on available scientific knowledge.

 A Few More Real Dinosaur Noises

Yes, so every TV show or film or documentary has always got the sound of dinosaurs wrong. There was no roaring going on with them.

It makes sense to study the animals most closely related to dinosaurs. That’s:

• Crocodiles with a larynx
• Birds with a syrinx

Dinosaurs didn’t have a larynx or syrinx and it was a fleshy material that made up what would have been a voice box.

A lot of this modern understanding dates to a 1995 discovery of a Parasaurolophus skull. It was scanned in 1997 at a hospital and a full 3D model of the skull was recreated.

That was then used to make an educated guess on the noises the dinosaur would make, based on air moving through the crest of the Parasaurolophus.

We envision a future where, as with whale song music for the likes of humpback whales, we’ll get dino song albums for relaxation purposes:

“Unwind and drift off to sleep with the mortifying honking in Now That’s What I Call Tyrannosaurus Rex Music #75. Only £5.99 while stocks last!!!!”

But what’s obvious with all of this is the dinosaur era of Earth was so very, very alien. It’s so bloody long ago now, it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

But we’re making some strides towards understanding these ancient creatures, which is a helpful reminder for the human condition (we think).

The arrogance of humanity thinking we’ve conquered Earth. We haven’t and hubris isn’t a great look in the grand, honking face of eternity stretching before us.