Early on a Monday morning in July I visited the San Antonio Zoo, a place I’ve been to and enjoyed a number of times before. But this time something was significantly different. Scattered throughout the park’s 56 acres were over a dozen life-sized, animatronic dinosaurs, all part of the “Zoorassic Park” exhibit intended in part help visitors understand “how dinosaurs teach us about today’s wildlife and the threats they face.”
Of course I’ve seen life-sized dinosaur statues before. When I was a kid my father hoisted me onto the back of a massive stone triceratops, a bit of childhood adventure I’ve never quite managed to forget. I’ve also seen my fair share of animatronic dinosaur exhibits, complete with primeval jungle noises and theme-park lettering emblazoned across the entrance.
The thing that made this experience so different was that San Antonio Zoo’s “Zoorassic Park” gave visitors the opportunity to compare – actually made it difficult not to compare – animatronic dinosaurs with their living relatives and usurpers. And the comparison was thought-provoking.
One obvious point of comparison was movement. Animatronic dinosaurs are typically designed to perform their full range of motion when people pass by a sensor. You walk by and they swing their tails. You walk by and they flap their wings or chomp their jaws or blink their eyes right at you. Not so with real animals. A majestic lion just happened to be next to a viewing window as I walked by it, and, for a minute, he gave me a sideview of him casually eating some grass, after which he plopped down on the ground, facing the opposite direction, and closed his eyes. The hippopotamus similarly presented a generous rear view, which happened to give the people clustered around a chance to see an array of cleaner fish at work on his or her broad backside. The unsurprising lesson is that animals don’t necessarily perform on cue, and when they do it isn’t necessarily as expected.
The point of comparison between real and animatronic animals that most interested me, however, had to do with sound. The zoo has a sort of sonic gateway. At the entrance (and exit) to the park, where the ticket kiosks are, JBL speakers play balafon ensemble music on continuous loop. In the language of Pathways to Music, I’m not sure how many visitors to the park hear this music with a rich cultural context, and I doubt the people who chose the music are trying to convey a specific cultural message. The general message is clear enough: Imagine that you’re about to leave San Antonio and enter a different world. Imagine that you’re on safari. But on this particular visit to the zoo, the second sound that greeted me was a powerful, even fearsome roar. The source was not a real animal, of course, but an animatronic dinosaur. But that’s not entirely accurate. Since no one can know exactly what dinosaurs sounded like, my understanding is that most dinosaur noises, in movies and in animatronic exhibits, are real or altered animal noises. So perhaps it was a souped-up lion roar that I heard on entering the park, but it was projected from an animatronic dinosaur.
When I walked by the Kosmoceratops, a species discovered and named in the last decade, I was greeted by some sort of bovine mooing, along with the requisite nodding of that massive horned head. When I finally arrived at the staged Tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops battle, the former gave the sort of mighty roar that established who was king of Isla Nublar at the end of Steven Spielburg’s Jurassic Park (1993). When my young sidekick on this particular visit half-hid behind me and clutched my hand, even though he knew full well that this particular T-rex was a machine firmly rooted in place, I thought to myself what extraordinary insight those sound designers had in crafting a noise that could so universally terrify. To use the language of Pathways to Music, I couldn’t help but wonder to what extent the thrill of hearing this sound was for me visceral – an irresistible blast that shakes you – and to what extent it was contextual – memories of nature documentaries about predators, some deep-seeded fight-or-flight impulse to self-protection, and, yes, that iconic moment from the Spielburg film.
The powerful noisiness of animatronic dinosaurs would not perhaps have struck me so much had there not been plenty of opportunity for sonic comparison. I’ve mentioned already the physical (non-)antics of the lion and hippopotamus, neither of which uttered so much as a peep in my presence. One of my favorite animals to visit at the San Antonio Zoo is the Aldabra giant tortoise, who obliged me by taking a few deliberate steps and craning his neck, perhaps to take a look at me. But if you’ve been around tortoises before, you already know how noisy an affair that was. One of the highlights of this zoo visit was a visit to the giraffe pen. This time a giraffe came straight up to me, and although it might look like he or she had something to say, the communication – a request to be fed – was almost entirely silent.
The exception to the animal kingdom’s preference for silence was the birds. From the conversational chirping of the lories to the noisy chattering of the egrets, who roost uninvited at the zoo, to the bickering of the similarly uninvited vultures to the blasting caw of the golden crested heron – the birds made significant noise, occasionally dramatic, but often ignored. These, then, were the great noisemakers: the curated and imagined sounds of dinosaurs, dreamed up from the recorded bleats and bellows of animals who in real life were determinedly quiet; and the real and varied sounds of the dinosaurs’ avian descendants.
Ultimately, my preference is for the messy, inconsistent, by turns disappointing and delightful real. But I must admit that the theme-park like diet of curated sound turns the experience of visiting the zoo into an emotional one, at least in part: one that plays on memory, fantasy, and perhaps even primal fears. I look forward to going back to the zoo after the exhibit is over, to see how different I feel because of how different things will inevitably sound.
(The image advertising “Zoorassic Park” is courtesy San Antonio Zoo. All other images courtesy the author. All rights reserved.)