We tend to associate dinosaurs with ground-shaking roars, but the latest research shows that this is probably mistaken.

You'd feel it more than hear it – a deep, visceral throb, emerging from somewhere beyond the thick foliage. Like the rumble of a foghorn, it would thrum in your ribcage and bristle the hairs on your neck. In the dense forests of the Cretaceous period, it would have been terrifying.

We have few clues for what noises dinosaurs might have made while they ruled the Earth before being killed off 66 million years ago. The remarkable stony remains uncovered by palaeontologists offer evidence of the physical prowess of these creatures, but not a great deal about how they interacted and communicated. Sound doesn't fossilise, of course.

From what we know about animal behaviour, however, dinosaurs were almost certainly not silent.

Now with the help of new, rare fossils and advanced analysis techniques, scientists are starting to piece together some of the clues about how dinosaurs might have sounded.

There is no single answer to this puzzle. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for around 179 million years and during that time, evolved into an enormous array of different shapes and sizes. Some were tiny, like the diminutive Albinykus, which weighed under a kilogram (2.2lbs) and was probably less than 2ft (60cm) long. Others were among the biggest animals to have ever lived on land, such as the titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum, which may have weighed up to 72 tonnes. They ran on two legs, or plodded on four. And along with these diverse body shapes, they would have produced an equally wide variety of noises.

Some dinosaurs had greatly elongated necks – up to 16m (52ft) long in the largest sauropods – which would have likely altered the sounds they produced (think about what happens when a trombone is extended). Others had bizarre skull structures that, much like wind instruments, could have amplified and altered the tone the animals produced. One such creature, a herbivorous hadrosaur named Parasaurolophus tubicen, would have been responsible for the fearsome calls described at the start of this article. (You can listen to the sound in the video further down this article.)

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P. tubicen had an enormous crest almost 1m (3.2ft) long protruding from the back of its head. Inside this were three pairs of hollow tubes running from the nose to the top of the crest, where two of the pairs performed a U-bend to wind back down towards the base of the skull and the animal's airways. The other pair widened to form a large chamber near the top of the crest. In total they formed what was essentially a 2.9m (9.5ft) long resonating chamber.

In 1995, palaeontologists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science unearthed a nearly complete skull of this unusual looking Parasaurolophus. Using a computerised tomography (CT) scanner, they were able to take 350 images of the crest, allowing them to see inside in unprecedented detail. Then, working with computer scientists, they digitally reconstructed the organ and simulated how it might behave if air was blown through it.

"I would describe the sound as otherworldly," says Tom Williamson, one of those who worked on the dig and is now curator of palaeontology at the museum. "It sent chills through my spine, I remember."

Roars or rumbles: the sounds of dinosaurs on film

Reproducing the sounds made by dinosaurs is a particular challenge for television and filmmakers.

While the Jurassic Park movies give their dinosaurs the kind of deafening roars that install terror into audiences, the producers behind the BBC's new series of Walking With Dinosaurs chose a different route.

"We relied a lot on a process called called 'phylogenetic bracketing'," says Jay Balamurugan, an assistant producer who worked on the series. "It is essentially the process of looking at living relatives on either side of the family tree of prehistoric animals to infer what characteristics their ancient cousins would have had. In the case of dinosaurs, we look at birds and crocodilians, and see what traits in sound those two groups share – such as hisses, bellows, and rumbles. Because they share these features, it is likely that dinosaurs did too."

* The new series of Walking With Dinosaurs starts on BBC One in the UK on 25 May in the UK and on PBS in the US on 16 June. You can find information on how to watch the series where you are in the world via the series website on BBC Earth.

The closest analogues he can find in living animals today are the vibrating grunts of the........

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