Behind the new series of the show which did for natural history TV what Jurassic Park did for movies.
The original series of Walking with Dinosaurs hatched a monster. It arrived in 1999, in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s first two Jurassic Park movies and used many of the same visual effects and animatronics techniques to create a natural history series about creatures that hadn’t existed for millions of years. The BBC show became the most-watched science programme in UK television history, and internationally its six half-hour episodes were seen by an estimated 700 million people, many of them kids too young for the scares of the Spielberg films.
It spawned a franchise of other VFX-driven BBC shows, including Walking with Beasts, Walking with Cavemen, Sea Monsters and Walking with Monsters. Additionally, there were spin-off books, exhibitions, and an acclaimed hit live show originally conceived by Bruce Mactaggart, the inaugural chief executive of Auckland’s Spark (formerly Vector) Arena. Walking with Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular used a dozen life-sized animatronic creatures built in Australia, and it toured the world for 12 years.
There was also a very much less acclaimed 2013 spin-off movie, Walking with Dinosaurs 3D, where the dinosaurs got cutesy voiceovers and in which our own Karl Urban – walking in Sam Neill’s Jurassic Park footsteps – played a modern-day palaeontologist at the beginning and end of the film. Both the original series and the film used South Island landscapes as prehistoric backdrops. Listen carefully in those New Zealand scenes; there’s the faint sound of a harrumphing tuatara.
Elsewhere, dinosaurs have kept creating big box office. The deathless Jurassic Park/World movies – a seventh arrives in July – remain popular and profitable despite franchise fatigue. When Auckland Museum exhibited Peter and Barbara, the skeletons of male and female Tyrannosaurus rexes, between 2022 and 2023, some 1.5million visitors came to see them. Te Papa’s ticketed exhibits Dinosaurs of Patagonia from last year and Tyrannosaurs a decade ago attracted 91,000 and 127,000 visitors respectively. Auckland Zoo has just opened its Dinosaur Discovery Track of 25 life-sized, Texas-made animatronic creatures in the zoo’s former elephant enclosure.
Back in 1999, the original Walking With Dinosaurs was a smash and got plenty of kudos for presenting dinosaurs not just as monsters to be feared. Some scientists had bones to pick, though, especially about the behaviour exhibited by the various species, particularly the Cynodonts, which, the show claimed, mated for life (who knew? Well, no one really). Or the Postosuchus, which after a fight would mark its territory with urine, giving us the planet’s first, if not scientifically proven, pissing contest.
Tellingly, because it wasn’t about real filmed fauna, and despite being born in the Mesozoic era, Sir David Attenborough turned down narrating the show. Voiceover duties went to Kenneth Branagh (“My kingdom for a brontosaurus!”). Attenborough’s stance on computer-generated natural history has softened over the years – among other CGI docs, he recently narrated two seasons of Apple TV+’s Prehistoric Planet, a series built very much on the Walking With Dinosaurs skeleton.
And perhaps mindful of Apple’s and Netflix’s incursions into the natural history market, BBC Studios is bringing back WWD for a 21st-century redo. Like its predecessor, it’s narrated by an actor, Bertie Carvel, of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Doctor Foster.
The new series is, say its producers, also a product of not just next-generation VFX but the enormous progression in palaeontology over the past 20 years. Which means the i dinos have feathers, different colours and unexpected behaviours. It seems the science is curiously fast-moving for one that studies things from millions of years ago.
And to set itself apart from the competition and regain some natural history credibility, each of the six episodes of the new season is a combination of a CGI story about a specific dinosaur as well as a visit to where palaeontologists have uncovered their fossils in digs in the US, Canada, Portugal and Morocco (see below).
“What’s different about this series is that the dinosaurs are all based on real scientific evidence that is coming out of the ground right now,” says WWD executive producer Andrew Cohen.
But that ground has changed over the centuries. What were once tropical forests or oceans are now deserts. What were once islands are now continental mountains. So finding plausible natural backdrops wasn’t always easy.
Says showrunner Kirsty Wilson: “I didn’t realise grass hadn’t evolved during the time of our dinosaurs. I’ve often joked that trying to find locations to set our dinosaurs in without modern grass was like asking to film on the moon.”
Once a suitable location was unearthed, WWD crew would often don the blue motion-capture suits and masks and act out the dinosaur narrative for visual-effects artists to build on, a process that could take more than two years to go from human miming to finished sequence. That blue-suit work included Wilson. “I wasn’t immune myself, running through the bushes in the rain pretending to be a baby triceratops.”
But the weirdness was worth it. “When we saw our hero dinosaurs, characters we had been thinking of, writing about, looking at their bones for years, finally come to life on screen for the very first time, it was truly unforgettable and actually quite emotional.”
A warning to more sensitive viewers: many of the six episodes involve young dinosaurs having to fend for themselves after things go a bit Bambi.
The featured creatures
Episode one: The Orphan
What: Clover, a juvenile Triceratops
When: 66 million years ago
Where today: Hell Creek Formation, Montana, USA
The story: Clover was a juvenile Triceratops, thought only to be about 4 years old and the size of a large dog. After escaping from a giant Pterosaur that has a 5m wingspan, she’s stalked by a Tyrannosaurus rex. The Pterosaur featured in the episode is a newly named species – Infernodrakon. The remains of Clover and a T Rex were found close together in the Hell Creek Formation, one of the most studied dinosaur fossil sites in the world.
Episode Two: The River Dragon
What: Sobek, a Spinosaurus
When: 100 million years ago.
Where: Sahara Desert, Morocco
The story: Sobek is a new father looking after his hatchlings and searching for a new home on the banks of an extensive river and swamplands, somewhere they’ll be safe from crocodiles, Titanosaurs, Pterosaurs, and a Carcharodontosaurus, with whom they get into an argument over lunch. The semi-aquatic Spinosaurus was bigger than a T rex and had a 2m-plus sail on its back. It has been a mystery dinosaur for palaeontologists, not helped by the fact that a Spinosaurus skeleton discovered in Egypt in 1912 and housed in a Munich museum was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II. Recreating the Spinosaurus required the crew to go swimming with a 2m-long, 8kg 3D-printed head.
Episode Three: The Band of Brothers
What: George, a young Gastonia
When: 130 million years ago
Where today: Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA
The story: Belonging to a group of armoured creatures known as Ankylosaurs, Gastonias were the spikiest of all dinosaurs – physically anyway. Otherwise they were quite social, even if they did butt heads quite a bit with the rest of their herd. George’s story involves him and a bunch of teenage mates in an encounter with Utahraptors, the largest of the raptor dinosaurs.
Episode Four: The Pack
What: Rose, an adolescent Albertosaurus
When: 71 million years ago
Where today: Horseshoe Canyon Formation, Alberta, Canada
The story: The Albertosaurus was the faster, nimbler relative of the T rex and hunted in packs, often preying on the enormous migratory herd animal, the Edmontosaurus. But Rose’s story involves her pack having to find food elsewhere because of volcanic eruptions, resulting in a fight for both protein and survival in the brutal late-Cretaceous period. Being an apex predator wasn’t always easy.
Episode Five: The Journey North
What: Albie, the Pachyrhinosaurus
When: 75 million years ago
Where: Pipestone Creek Pachyrhinosaurus Bonebed, northwest Alberta, Canada
The story: It’s a tale of one of the largest dinosaur herds ever, told through the eyes of a young Pachyrhinosaurus – a tough-snouted species that was a close relative to the Triceratops. The pack, which swells into the tens of thousands, undergoes a 600km trek in search of food. Along the way, if the Pachyrhinosaurus bulls fighting for superiority aren’t a big enough problem, Albie and co must deal with predatory Gorgosaurus and cataclysmic weather.
Episode Six: Island of Giants
What: Old Grande, a Lusotitan
When: 150 million years ago
Where today: Pombal, Portugal
The story: The series ends with a Jurassic period romance and the story of Old Grande, one of the largest dinosaurs ever to have stomped across Europe, back when the continent was a series of islands. The herbivore brachiosaurid dinosaur is on a mission to win over a female but is wounded in the process. His recovery is threatened by a Torvosaurus, which at just 11m long and 3m tall, would normally be no match for the Lusotitan’s 25m length and 40-tonne weight. Old Grande is the largest and most complete Lusotitan ever found, unearthed in a back garden by a homeowner in the city of Pombal in 2017.
Walking with Dinosaurs starts on TVNZ 1, 7pm, Monday, June 2, then 7.30pm, Mondays. New episodes arrive weekly on TVNZ+.
Auckland Zoo’s “Dinosaur Discovery Track” is open until June 30.