Walking With Dinosaurs 2025

[Dynomikegojira]

Yeah I definitely want to see them in motion but they look better CG wise than Planet Dinosaur and Dinosaur Final Day.

[Pachyrhinosaurus]

While I'm not really into the colors, the purple and stripes do take me back to how I would have colored my drawings when I was in middle school.

[Joliezac]

I cannot wait to see this! Pics look good so far.

[Halichoeres]

If there's going to be a Spinosaurus segment, I hope they spare some screen time for the fishes.

[DinoToyForum]

I too am disappointed by what the images show.  Pachyrhinosaurus and tyrannosaurids have been showcased so much already.  I have hope for the Utahraptor episode and the Spinosaurus episode, but the rest seems so boring already due to the repetitive choice of species or ecosystem.

I agree. The original Walking with Dinosaurs series was special for introducing the public to ecosystems and creatures that had never been widely depicted in popular media before. Unapologetically and with gusto, it took viewers beyond the familiar faunas of the Hell Creek and Morrison Formations. The stories were original and resonated with emotion, and the WWD creature designs are charismatic to the point of being iconic. WWD is to Liopleurodon what Jurassic Park is to Velociraptor. In this regard WWD was a paleo-pop-cultural phenomenon that, in my opinion, no subsequent documentary series has equalled. Prehistoric Planet comes the closest to recapturing the special 'something' that WWD has in spades...but not quite. I'm hopeful that this new WWD series will continue the tone set by the original and adopt the same boundary-pushing approach, and not be another by-the-numbers dino-documentary.

[Duna]

I don't want it to be another "Life" style documentary: just throw several short "wow" scenes without relation to shock the audience and that's it.

I want to be engaged in the migration of a placerias, a fight for life of a baby diplodocus, the incredible last journey of a giant pterosaur, the end of a giant of the seas, the stories of wins and loses of herbivores, spirits thriving in an ice forest, the mourn of baby tyrannosaurus in a decandent world ... Those iconic designs and colours (in Prehistoric Planet didn't go for that), those stories ... Please, I want more of that. 

[Dynomikegojira]

I don't want it to be another "Life" style documentary: just throw several short "wow" scenes without relation to shock the audience and that's it.

I want to be engaged in the migration of a placerias, a fight for life of a baby diplodocus, the incredible last journey of a giant pterosaur, the end of a giant of the seas, the stories of wins and loses of herbivores, spirits thriving in an ice forest, the mourn of baby tyrannosaurus in a decandent world ... Those iconic designs and colours (in Prehistoric Planet didn't go for that), those stories ... Please, I want more of that. 

It's said to be similar to The Ballad of Big Al.

[HD-man]

It's said to be similar to The Ballad of Big Al.

Hopefully more accurate for its time than Ballad was : https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=2210.msg331751#msg331751

Not sure how I feel about that image. Maybe it's just me, but it looks more video gamey (for lack of a better term) than the other 2 images (which I think look pretty good, though not PhP good).

[Sim]

I'm still concerned about some of the species choices.  Tyrannosaurids have been featured so much, Albertosaurus specifically had a role in March of the dinosaurs, and Pachyrhinosaurus was in that too...  And Walking with dinosaurs 2 looks like it will have two tyrannosaurid and ceratopsid episodes.  Not only am I concerned about how similar these two episodes will be, but also how similar they will be to other tyrannosaurid and ceratopsid depictions in documentaries.  I also count five of the six episodes as focused on dinosaurs so far, while in Walking with dinosaurs it was only three (episode 1 had Coelophysis having a main role but the rest of the episode focused on non-dinosaurs).  I'm just worried WWD2 will not have the "freshness" WWD had, as @DinoToyForum described.  I'm really tired of tyrannosaurids and ceratopsids in documentaries and WWD2 having two episodes with them isn't giving me a good feeling.  Again, I'm hopeful about the Utahraptor and Spinosaurus episodes, even if the latter will probably feature the disputed ecology of Spinosaurus according to Ibrahim.

[Brocc21]

I don't want it to be another "Life" style documentary: just throw several short "wow" scenes without relation to shock the audience and that's it.

I want to be engaged in the migration of a placerias, a fight for life of a baby diplodocus, the incredible last journey of a giant pterosaur, the end of a giant of the seas, the stories of wins and loses of herbivores, spirits thriving in an ice forest, the mourn of baby tyrannosaurus in a decandent world ... Those iconic designs and colours (in Prehistoric Planet didn't go for that), those stories ... Please, I want more of that. 

Certainly. As much as I enjoyed Prehistoric Planet, its short, unrelated segments often left me feeling underwhelmed. Always wanting more, but not in the good way. WWD still stands above its peers, not because of its scientific accuracy or special effects, but because of its narrative quality. Investing yourself in the stories of its world always felt so rewarding and worthwhile, and I want to experience all of those feeling again with these series.

Also, has there been any word on Kenneth or Benjamin returning?

[Torvosaurus]

...WWD still stands above its peers, not because of its scientific accuracy...

As long as folks realize that in 1999, WWD did depict dinosaurs according to the best scientific knowledge available. There were errors, some of them conscientious such as portraying Utahraptor in Europe, but for the most part dinosaurs were portrayed as realistic as we currently knew them. For some that was better than the story.

I'm not saying that you disagree, I'm merely saying that for some just seeing dinosaurs portrayed in such a manner was enough.

Torvo

Edit: BTW, I am really looking forward to the new WWD series with a hope they do it according to the latest scientific studies.

[Dynomikegojira]

I don't want it to be another "Life" style documentary: just throw several short "wow" scenes without relation to shock the audience and that's it.

I want to be engaged in the migration of a placerias, a fight for life of a baby diplodocus, the incredible last journey of a giant pterosaur, the end of a giant of the seas, the stories of wins and loses of herbivores, spirits thriving in an ice forest, the mourn of baby tyrannosaurus in a decandent world ... Those iconic designs and colours (in Prehistoric Planet didn't go for that), those stories ... Please, I want more of that. 

Certainly. As much as I enjoyed Prehistoric Planet, its short, unrelated segments often left me feeling underwhelmed. Always wanting more, but not in the good way. WWD still stands above its peers, not because of its scientific accuracy or special effects, but because of its narrative quality. Investing yourself in the stories of its world always felt so rewarding and worthwhile, and I want to experience all of those feeling again with these series.

Also, has there been any word on Kenneth or Benjamin returning?

Ben said he hasn't been asked to return and Kenneth is unknown but considering how busy he is I honestly doubt he'll return.

[HD-man]

As long as folks realize that in 1999, WWD did depict dinosaurs according to the best scientific knowledge available.

Sorry, but...


This Naish quote comes to mind 1st ( https://web.archive.org/web/20130513001911/http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/05/20/100-years-of-tyrannosaurus-rex/ ):

What was wrong with the WWD T. rex (comment 16)? Err: everything. It's horrible, and whoever created it looked only briefly at the real animal. Philip (comment 21) mentions some of the problems. I could write a whole essay on how bad that model is, but I'll just concentrate on the head, as it's particularly offensive. The WWD animal doesn't really have the flaring cheeks of T. rex, it lacks the little cheek horns, its teeth are widely spaced and essentially homodont (T. rex was markedly heterodont, with closely packed incisiform teeth and long teeth in the maxilla), its snout slopes down such that the snout tip is 'stepped down' relative to the region in front of the eyes, it has a totally imaginary thickened rim around the edges of the upper jaws, its nostril is located on the top of its snout as if it's a hippo, it has a weird, sunken antorbital area that is in the wrong place, it has a horizontal ridge running ventral to its eye (no such structure in T. rex), it has a great big horn right over its eye (as opposed to the blunt preorbital hornlet and massive, rounded postorbital boss present in the real thing) and the back of its head was complete fiction which made it look at if the head was somehow a separate entity from the unmuscled, scrawny neck. The skull of T. rex is a shapely, sophisticated thing that we have excellent information on: the WWD thing was a total monstrosity. For those who don't know, I would like you to note that (with Dave Martill, allegedly), I wrote a book called Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to be too critical of any of the WWD stuff, but I did say some vaguely negative stuff about the T. rex on p. 149.

Speaking of Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence (which I reviewed: www.goodreads.com/review/show/3483387140 ), this Martill/Naish quote also comes to mind:

New discoveries of small theropods in Lower Cretaceous rocks of China show that all small theropods had featherlike structures covering their bodies. In light of this, the Dromaeosaurus in Walking with Dinosaurs should have been depicted with quill-like structures such as those seen on the Ornitholestes in Time of the Titans, rather than with the naked, scaly skin it was given.

[Flaffy]

The hindlimbs were also infamously ungulitigrade rather than digitigrade for some reason. The odd anatomy of the skull and legs reminds me quite a bit of the Schleich Moros... as if the toy was a spiritual successor 30 years after the horrendous WWD rex.
 

[Torvosaurus]

H @HD-man Naish wrote that in 2009, ten years after WWD, and a good portion of the papers he quotes occurred post 1997. A good portion of the papers he uses were printed during or after production (approximately 1997ish) of WWD, so using those in a current 1999 criticism isn't justified.

The second thing to consider is that the world-wide web was starting to see consistent use with the advent of Internet Explorer, but things weren't anywhere as organized as they are today. Wikipedia wasn't even invented until 2001, IIRC, and Naish started Tetzoo in 2005 or 2006, well after WWD. His analysis is completely accurate by all means as a current measure of dinosaur accuracy, but came out way too late to be an actual critique of the show. Even with access to periodicals, not all journals were available to all scientists.

As far as the dromeosaurs go, having quills or not-having quills could have gone either way, and as it turned out dromeosaurs most-likely had actual feathers anyways. IIRC, just how many small dinosaurs had quills (or feathers) was still being debated, so there was no clear consensus. Remember, Sinosauropteryx had just been described in 1996,

As far as what the mass of the populace knew, there was no way to double-check the results with an on-line resource and I don't know how many folks had currently updated encyclopedias. Folks did see it as the best dinosaur documentary ever made, and the dinosaur experts used were well-versed.

@Flaffy I didn't like the t-rex either; it actually looked like it had been shrink-wrapped with little padding added, and it was way too thin overall. Sometimes it was unguligrade rather digitigrade. IMO, it was the worst dinosaur in the WWD series.

Anyways, it's easy to pick WWD apart now or even just a few years after it came out thanks to current papers, but hard to use those later papers to understate just how influential WWD was when it was released.

Torvo

[Crackington]

Actually WWD received quite a bit of criticism when it aired.

I recall attending a talk on the programme led by Mike Howgate, a UCL palaeontologist and founder of the Dinosaur Collectors Club in London (what we did before the web  ).

He went though the first episode using a grainy video I think he must have recorded himself, pausing every 30 seconds or so to criticise something or other.

He was particularly critical of the urinating Postosuchus - his biggest gripe was that that the show was presenting unprovable behaviour as if it were scientific fact.

The other attendees were a little less critical, one pointing out that it was great that the BBC had commissioned such a big show.

Mike was more positive about the WWD toys (he was also a collector) and keenly sold some afterwards, including the Postosuchus!

[HD-man]

Naish wrote that in 2009, ten years after WWD, and a good portion of the papers he quotes occurred post 1997. A good portion of the papers he uses were printed during or after production (approximately 1997ish) of WWD, so using those in a current 1999 criticism isn't justified.

The 1st sentence makes it sound as if no one knew how to reconstruct T. rex accurately pre-1997 In actuality, GSPaul's "numerous life restorations of T. rex—dynamic as well as scientifically accurate—became the norm" by 1987 ( https://books.google.com/books?id=5WH9RnfKco4C&pg=PA420&dq=%22see+paul+1987%22+%22numerous+life%22 ). The Ultimate Guide: Tyrannosaurus rex is an especially good example of that: https://x.com/Titanlizard_Art/status/1256920511063392256

The 2nd sentence is very misleading, given how much WWD itself had changed btwn early 1997 & late 1999:

The second thing to consider is that the world-wide web was starting to see consistent use with the advent of Internet Explorer, but things weren't anywhere as organized as they are today.

Fair point if we're talking about "the fact that many artists paid to illustrate fossil animals for books and such are given minimal advice (or no advice at all), are working to near-impossible deadlines, and are working for peanuts" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20150530061634/https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/all-yesterdays-book-and-launch-event/ ). However, 2 things to keep in mind:
-1) WWD was a very different situation (I.e. Funded by the BBC, BBC Worldwide, & the Discovery Channel; Made by a team of animators who worked closely w/several dino experts; etc).
-2) While much more difficult for independent non-experts to do much up-to-date personal research pre-2000s, it wasn't unheard of. In fact, Tippett made the mostly-accurate-for-1984 Prehistoric Beast all by himself in his garage, yet his T. rex is also more accurate than WWD's ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44293060 ):

In addition to the film's consulting palaeontologist Jack Horner, Tippett also had a great deal of dinosaur knowledge. " bought every book that came out on dinosaurs. So I was pretty well in tune with what the state of the science was at that point in time," he told the BBC.

As far as the dromeosaurs go, having quills or not-having quills could have gone either way, and as it turned out dromeosaurs most-likely had actual feathers anyways. IIRC, just how many small dinosaurs had quills (or feathers) was still being debated, so there was no clear consensus.

No offense meant, but the 1st sentence seems confused in a "Can't See the Forest for the Trees" sort of way ( https://www.idioms.online/cant-see-the-forest-for-the-trees/ ). As for the 2nd sentence, coelurosaurs being "cloaked in protofeathers" ( https://archive.org/details/sim_natural-history_1998-09_107_7/page/32 ) has been the consensus among dino experts since 1997-98 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20190530163414/https://www.nature.com/news/1998/980702/full/news980702-8.html ). Point is, WWD's dromaeosaurs (among other things) could've & should've been more accurate than they were. I'm not saying WWD's creators didn't try to "depict dinosaurs according to the best scientific knowledge available", just that they often didn't succeed.

[DinoToyForum]

Naish wrote that in 2009, ten years after WWD, and a good portion of the papers he quotes occurred post 1997. A good portion of the papers he uses were printed during or after production (approximately 1997ish) of WWD, so using those in a current 1999 criticism isn't justified.

The 1st sentence makes it sound as if no one knew how to reconstruct T. rex accurately pre-1997 In actuality, GSPaul's "numerous life restorations of T. rex—dynamic as well as scientifically accurate—became the norm" by 1987 ( https://books.google.com/books?id=5WH9RnfKco4C&pg=PA420&dq=%22see+paul+1987%22+%22numerous+life%22 ). The Ultimate Guide: Tyrannosaurus rex is an especially good example of that: https://x.com/Titanlizard_Art/status/1256920511063392256

The 2nd sentence is very misleading, given how much WWD itself had changed btwn early 1997 & late 1999:

The second thing to consider is that the world-wide web was starting to see consistent use with the advent of Internet Explorer, but things weren't anywhere as organized as they are today.

Fair point if we're talking about "the fact that many artists paid to illustrate fossil animals for books and such are given minimal advice (or no advice at all), are working to near-impossible deadlines, and are working for peanuts" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20150530061634/https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/all-yesterdays-book-and-launch-event/ ). However, 2 things to keep in mind:
-1) WWD was a very different situation (I.e. Funded by the BBC, BBC Worldwide, & the Discovery Channel; Made by a team of animators who worked closely w/several dino experts; etc).
-2) While much more difficult for independent non-experts to do much up-to-date personal research pre-2000s, it wasn't unheard of. In fact, Tippett made the mostly-accurate-for-1984 Prehistoric Beast all by himself in his garage, yet his T. rex is also more accurate than WWD's ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44293060 ):

In addition to the film's consulting palaeontologist Jack Horner, Tippett also had a great deal of dinosaur knowledge. " bought every book that came out on dinosaurs. So I was pretty well in tune with what the state of the science was at that point in time," he told the BBC.

As far as the dromeosaurs go, having quills or not-having quills could have gone either way, and as it turned out dromeosaurs most-likely had actual feathers anyways. IIRC, just how many small dinosaurs had quills (or feathers) was still being debated, so there was no clear consensus.

No offense meant, but the 1st sentence seems confused in a "Can't See the Forest for the Trees" sort of way ( https://www.idioms.online/cant-see-the-forest-for-the-trees/ ). As for the 2nd sentence, coelurosaurs being "cloaked in protofeathers" ( https://archive.org/details/sim_natural-history_1998-09_107_7/page/32 ) has been the consensus among dino experts since 1997-98 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20190530163414/https://www.nature.com/news/1998/980702/full/news980702-8.html ). Point is, WWD's dromaeosaurs (among other things) could've & should've been more accurate than they were. I'm not saying WWD's creators didn't try to "depict dinosaurs according to the best scientific knowledge available", just that they often didn't succeed.

In the case of the dromaeosaurs, including the Utahraptors, the producers and consultants knew they should have feathers but were limited by the technology at the time. This is according to conversations I've had with the consultants and, if memory serves, a talk I attended by Tim Haines.

I know from my own experience working as a TV consultant on BBCs Planet Dinosaur (my name appears in the credits of one episode just after John Hurt's!), that technical and practical factors can sometimes supersede other considerations.

[Crackington]

Just a quick point on H @HD-man's point about WWD being well funded by the BBC etc Al.  Whilst true it has made me recall another thing which came up at the talk I attended when WWD first aired.

There was an animator or an artist from the show there, sorry I don't recall which, but he didn't seem very happy with that side of things. It had been very hard work and long hours etc and he hinted he hadn't been paid properly. It sounded like he was working for a smaller company engaged by the BBC, so not employed directly by them.

My impression was that they weren't treated that well.

Unfortunately, he didn't say too much more as most of the talk centred on the dissection of Episode 1 and the wee-ing Postosuchus!

[Torvosaurus]

H @HD-man We are looking at this from two different points. You are looking at it from a director/crew/paleontology staff's point of view. I'm looking at it from an every-day Joe on the street who knows very little about dinosaurs, who saw WWD for the first time and was overwhelmed by the dinosaurs and landscapes that it provided. I'm talking about people who didn't have a dinosaur-nut in the family, who didn't have the encyclopedias or access to the internet of today and who generally knew very little about dinosaurs. How many of those people were taught that dinosaurs drug their tails around and lived in water in school? I was taught that, though I had gone to college right about the time Bakker published "The Dinosaur Heresies" and the Dinosaur Renaissance was in full bloom. We can sit here and argue all the points, for example how prevalent quills/fuzz/feathers were and whether they should have been on some dinos. But in the end, the general fact is that the general populace was told that WWD was the most-accurate show of its kind, and they believed it. At the time, it was the best documentary dinosaur show that had been produced. My co-workers at the refinery, my parents, my friends, my wife, were amazed at the way dinosaurs were portrayed. In some ways, it was a "realistic" portrayal of dinosaurs compared to the "monsters", so to speak, seen in the Jurassic Park series. That is the perspective I'm supplying here, not from a scientific perspective, but as an every-day kind of guy who saw dinosaurs portrayed in that manner.

Torvo