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Stephen McCarty

Make no bones about it: dinosaurs are a perennial big deal.
As passionate palaeontologist Dr Nizar Ibrahim puts it: “When museums are talking about bringing in exhibitions, they say the two themes that always work are mummies and dinosaurs!”
And dinosaurs’ outsize appeal extends to television. In 1999, the BBC unleashed what it calls “one of [its] most beloved factual shows”, Walking with Dinosaurs.
Now, after a surprisingly long interlude, comes Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed, a six-part continuation and a celebration of animals that were always much more than the sum of their movie counterparts.


For this is a series that isn’t afraid to show the cuddly side of the “terrible lizards” – even, perhaps, with a touch of unashamed anthropomorphism, giving the beasts’ names and imagined family lives.
“Looking at all the information we have – pathology, environment, food, age, offspring – we’re bringing all that together as character-led stories based on genuine evidence,” says Thomas Scott, head of development at BBC Studios Science Unit, speaking, with Ibrahim, by video from Britain.
Dinosaurs aren’t just the monsters you see in movies
Thomas Scott, head of development at BBC Studios Science Unit
“We wanted to tell stories of well-rounded creatures that didn’t just bite things all day. They were parents, they faced challenges and weren’t always the apex kings of their environments,” he adds.
“So we wanted stories where you rooted for them, or feared them, or loved them, where you felt a complete set of emotions. Just like when you watch documentaries about big cats in Africa: once you’ve seen their struggles you want them to make that kill.
“Dinosaurs aren’t just the monsters you see in movies.”

Ibrahim, senior lecturer in palaeontology at the University of Portsmouth, in England, says: “One hopes the series will encourage a broader interest in fossils, because they’re an amazing window into ‘deep time’.
“Many of the problems we’re facing – climate change, changes in sea level, biodiversity loss, extinction, overfishing – you can only really understand if you have a deep-time perspective.”
“In Walking with Dinosaurs,” he adds, “we see reconstructions of our planet tens of millions of years ago. And the only reason we know there was a mass extinction, for example, is because of palaeontology. We might be in the middle of one now, so the series is a gateway to this important deep-time view.”
Ibrahim is also the human star of episode two of the series, “The River Dragon”. The instalment follows Sobek, a Spinosaurus that lived 100 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period. Africa and South America have recently divorced and the future Sahara is a forested river region; we find Sobek deeply, loudly asleep in a shady grove.


Sobek – “dad looking after the kids”, as Scott calls him – is the supervisor of a regular crèche of “babies”, responsible, like some modern bird species, for all parental duties, female Spinosauruses not sticking around after laying their eggs.
For the intimidating Sobek, size matters as he shepherds his juvenile flock towards a watery hunting ground. But for them and him – even at 11 metres long and with a permanently erect, spiny “sail” along his back – the journey is perilous.
So too are the perambulations of Clover in episode one, titled, with no small dose of emotional manipulation, “The Orphan”.
Real-life adventures are far more exciting than anything Hollywood could dream up
Dr Nizar Ibrahim, senior lecturer in palaeontology at the University of Portsmouth
Clover is a lonely, three-year-old Triceratops making her way in what will become, in about 66 million years, Montana. It’s a part of the world the vulnerable youngster, “the size of a large dog”, must share with the Infernodrakon (the “dragon from hell”), with its five-metre wingspan, and the scene stealer of every dinosaur reconstruction: the four-metre-tall, eight-tonne Tyrannosaurus rex.
Contemporary natural history shows usually have an admirable conservationist agenda. But what’s the aim for a series dealing in long-departed flying reptiles, antique fish and terrestrial terrors brought back to life by special effects?
“We want people to watch the show as a piece of storytelling, but it’s also an opportunity to understand [palaeontology’s] scientific process,” Scott says.

“We combine footage from dig sites as bones are unearthed with evidence that explains the dinosaurs’ lives. Viewers see the hard work that goes into the research enabling us to understand these amazing creatures. It’s an opportunity to show how science works on a bigger scale.”
The new Walking with Dinosaurs – narrated by actor Bertie Carvel, better known as P.D. James’ detective Adam Dalgliesh – presents an arresting array of next-generation CGI stars. But their ancestors would never be resurrected if not for our real Indiana Joneses.
“Some of the things we experience in the field are just like in a movie – except they’re all real,” says Ibrahim, discoverer, in Morocco, of the world’s only extant Spinosaurus fossil skeleton.

“So unlike in a movie, where you have stuntmen and rubber snakes, there’s a real horned desert viper staring at you as you’re trying to climb that steep escarpment to the dig site.
“I’ve had so many incredible experiences and that’s one thing I wanted to convey: that real-life adventures are far more exciting than anything Hollywood could dream up,” he says. “I’ve travelled through airports with a human skull and dug up giant, SUV-sized fish.
“The landscapes are also amazing and I’m so glad we’ve been able to capture some of that.”
Episodes of Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed will be shown in Hong Kong on BBC Earth (Now TV Channel 220) every Sunday at 8pm from June 1. They will also be available every Monday at 12 noon from May 26 on BBC Earth Video On Demand


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Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed fleshes out its fossil stories with hard scientific data and emotional storytelling


Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed fleshes out its fossil stories with hard scientific data and emotional storytelling.


New BBC show Walking with Dinosaurs has ‘character-led stories based on genuine evidence’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed fleshes out its fossil stories with hard scientific data and emotional storytelling

Walking with Dinosaurs: Legends Unearthed fleshes out its fossil stories with hard scientific data and emotional storytelling