More than 25 years ago, Andrew Cohen had just begun his career at BBC Studios Science Unit when they launched a new series, Walking with Dinosaurs. It was a tremendous hit, one which many scientists later credited with inspiring their career paths. Now, in an expansive collaboration between BBC and PBS, with co-producers ZDF in Germany and France Télévisions, Cohen is the executive producer for a new version of Walking with Dinosaurs, aiming to inspire the next generation of dino lovers.
Cohen says discussions have been happening for years about when to return to this series, but finally, the stars aligned. “The amount of new information in paleontology just felt as if it was exploding,” he says. “We have an enormous amount of knowledge to share and felt that we could bring the series back in a new form, marrying the contemporary paleontology with stories of the animals we could bring ‘back to life.’” This marriage of ideas is a unique aspect of this series. Each of the six episodes presents a current dig site and the fossils being discovered today and then uses breathtaking visual effects to recreate the animals and the environments these fossils represent.
Diana El-Osta, PBS’s Senior Director of Multi-Platform Programming and Development, says the enthusiasm for the series’ return has been impressive. “Fans of the original Walking with Dinosaurs had been waiting. When we announced the series was coming back there was a ton of excitement in online forums and social media with people expressing their love for this franchise. We heard from a lot of paleontologists who worked on episodes that they became paleontologists because of the original series.”
BBC Studios Science Unit is known for its dedication to research, and this program is no exception. They were committed to focusing on dig sites that were active and telling stories about a wide range of dinosaurs. They talked to more than 200 paleontologists in their quest to find the most cutting-edge science and active paleontology. According to El-Osta, “The team at the BBC Studios Science Unit is really the gold standard in this type of filmmaking. They did a fantastic job securing access to best-in-class scientists across the globe, from Utah to Morocco. Their reputation for excellence in science journalism allowed these scientists, who can sometimes be quite private about their work, to invite them into their sites and give them this type of access.”
One of these paleontologists was Dr. Emily Bamforth, curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. Alberta’s Pipestone Creek Bone Bed, where Bamforth focuses her work, is unique because it is located in the middle of a forest. Even more importantly, the site represents the remains of a massive community of one species of dinosaur. “Since it was discovered in the 1970s, there have been over 8,000 fossils collected from this site,” she says. “They’re primarily one species of dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus, and we have all ages represented — babies, adults, sub-adults, and teenagers. So, it was a herd of these animals that all died at the same place. It leads to the question of what happened here. How did so many dinosaurs get here and what were they doing in this massive, massive herd?” Bamforth’s work became the focus of the series’ fifth episode, “The Journey North.”
This moment in time has become known as “the golden age of paleontology” as it is a moment so rich with discovery. According to Bamforth, “The public interest has been through the roof. I think it’s probably fair to say that Jurassic Park kicked that off. The more we know, the more intrigued we get. Dinosaurs have never, since they were first described in the 1820s, been more popular than they are today.”
Cohen is particularly excited to share those discoveries and to reset people’s perceptions of dinosaurs. “While paleontology was born in Britain, it exploded in the United States, so we associate much of our understanding of dinosaurs with North America. It’s been really interesting to learn about dinosaurs from Portugal and Africa. The African dinosaur, the Spinosaurus, has so many features that feel as if they were almost put together by a kid’s imagination. I think we’ll be resetting a generation’s relationship with how dinosaurs looked.” He notes that the research around feathered dinosaurs, in particular, will be a surprise to many, and current visual effects techniques enhance their ability to share that knowledge.
Accurately representing how the dinosaurs looked, moved, and sounded was a tall order and relied heavily on these close relationships with the paleontologists. “We worked incredibly closely with our paleontology teams to create the most scientifically accurate representation of the animals, of their environments, of the sounds they make, of how they move,” says Cohen. “It was an amazingly privileged experience to be able to go back and forth with hundreds of questions around each of the animals as we started to create them with the visual effects. By marrying this knowledge and the imagination of what’s in the brains of the paleontologists on site and the brilliant effects team, enables these incredible images to come out of it.”
El-Osta, Cohen, and Bamforth each have different thoughts about what they most want people to learn from the series. Bamforth hopes people realize that dinosaurs are animals and not the monsters they can be as in portrayed in movies, that paleontology is real science based in fact, and that paleontologists come from all walks of life. “We are not Alan Grant from Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones. We are real people,” she says.
El-Osta, for her part, hopes to inspire. “This is multigenerational programming that appeals to adults, to grandparents, and to kids. I really want parents to watch this with their kids because it’s science in action in an exciting, relatable, entertaining, and fun way. I think this could really inspire a lot of kids to become dino lovers and perhaps future paleontologists.”
In the end, Cohen captured something they all expressed in different ways. “Paleontology is a brilliant, if not the best, example of the combination of curiosity and imagination. I’m hoping that by connecting audiences with paleontologists in the way we’re telling these stories, that curiosity and imagination will be fired up in a new generation. Perhaps people will look at a bird slightly differently and think about the connection that has with these animals that lived 100 million years ago.”
Walking with Dinosaurs airs Mon (6/16) to Wed (6/18) at 8pm and 9pm on GBH 2.
Encore presentations will occur throughout the summer.
Watch the trailer here.
Click below to watch Episode One.
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