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.