How the dinosaur sounds in Jurassic Park were made

Vulture has made a great collection of clips from Jurassic Park accompanied by comments by sound designer Gary Rydstrom. Here’s an example:

Tyrannosaurus rex
 
The fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is one of the biggest animals in Jurassic Park, but some of its key noises came from Rydstrom’s tiny Jack Russell terrier, Buster. “The way they animated the T. rex was very doglike, especially when it grabs the Gallimimus and the lawyer and shakes them to death,” said Rydstrom. “Every day I would see my dog playing with the rope toy and doing exactly that, pretending like he’s killing his prey.” Was Buster’s Jurassic Park cameo an isolated incident? “No, I use my pets all the time,” laughed Rydstrom. “In Terminator 2, I recorded the sound of Buster eating puppy chow, and that became the crunch when the T-1000 spiked that guy’s eye socket.”
 
“One of the fun things in sound design is to take a sound and slow it down: It becomes much bigger,” he continued. “That was inspired by Ben Burtt, the great sound designer from the Star Wars movies and a mentor of mine: He did the Rancor beast in Return of the Jedi by slowing a chihuahua sound down. It’s one of the secrets of sound design that if you slow something down, something small, it brings out elements of the sound that you could probably never get if you recorded something big.”

Watch many more clips and get the stories behind the dinosaur sounds here.

Thanks to the sounDesign blog for spotting this