 The 2017 King Kong movie is set in an uncharted island where animals have grown completely out of proportion. Over the last 80 years, these mega monsters seemingly become larger in each film, more fierce and... Visually, these large beasts are loosely based of real animals. But what about the sounds they make? We wanted to find out how accurate these sounds are. What would a giant beast actually sound like? The very first thing that you have to say upfront, absolutely, is we know we're not making documentaries. That's Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist and animal anatomy specialist who worked on Kong's Kull Island and has advised filmmakers on dozens of movies. So people can quibble all they want about the biology of the creatures. Some cases like the lizardy, reptile-y things are completely fictitious creatures, but you want them to feel like they live in the universe that the movie is portraying. And in the case of the title character, there is no ape that looks like that because he walks like a man. But he's not a gorilla, he's King Kong. So he's a different species as far as the movie is concerned. The point he and others make is that these creatures don't actually exist, but they still need a sound that feels real. Or even if they did once exist, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, what they do is sometimes unrealistic. You'll notice in the movies, Jurassic Park and others, when they're chasing down human prey, they roar at it, which is ridiculous. He's right, that's Philip Senner, associate professor of biology at Fayetteville State University. No predator vocalizes when hunting. They hunt as silently as possible. You are pounced on before you even know you're being hunted. But it's a movie, and that scene wouldn't have been as scary if the T-Rex stayed silent. In fact, even when sound designers could pull from similar real-life examples, they often reach for the unexpected, like a hatching dino egg from Jurassic Park. These large ice cream cones will end up being the egg cracking sound. Paleontologists have been trying to figure out what dinosaurs sounded like for decades. It's hard to get an answer because the vocal organs used to make sounds, like the vocal cords in our throat, are mostly made of flesh, and flesh does not fossilize. So for clues, scientists look at dinosaurs' closest relatives, birds and crocodilians, which yes, includes crocodiles. Birds make a variety of high-pitched chirps, but if you look at the larger birds, like ostriches, emus and cassowaries, they make rumbling sounds that are lower in frequency. Some scientists believe that these low-frequency sounds are probably more similar to what dinosaurs must have made. But the other dino relatives, like crocodiles and alligators, make booming low-frequency sounds as well. That's kind of different from the high-pitched screech of velociraptors in Jurassic Park, isn't it? Obviously, there were many different kinds of dinos, and they all sounded different. But scientists have a better idea of what one type in particular could have sounded like. Duck-billed dinosaurs. That's because these animals had a large, hollowed crest on top of their heads. When the dinosaur breathed, the air went through the tubings inside the crest and it resonated, making this very low-frequency buzzing sort of sound. Kind of like a DJ we do. In 1978, David Wise-Hampel, a master's student at the University of Toronto, created a prototype to replicate the sound of one type of duck-billed dino, the Parasaurophilus. It was made of PVC, the same material your home pipes are made of. When you blow air into it, you can basically hear what a duck-billed dinosaur sounded like while breathing. Other scientists then replicated the sound using computer models. And this is what they came up with. Nice. Now, let's compare that to the same dino in Jurassic Park, The Lost World. Now in this scene, though, the dino is in distress, so its calls could sound completely different than when it's just breathing. The film sounds are more high-pitched. The filmmakers actually recorded cows through long tubes. And the sound actually doesn't seem too far off to me, but the more scientifically accurate one is deeper. And that makes a lot of sense. Most of these dinosaurs lived in really heavily forested environments, you know, jungles. It's Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. So these low-frequency sounds are actually the types of sounds that travel the best through this sort of habitat. So movies aren't focused on depicting accurate sounds for a lot of reasons. When it comes to giant creatures and monsters, it's just better to shut off the science part of your brain.