by Thinus Ferreira
Celebrating 25 years since the jaw-dropping original Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC is back with a new, updated Walking with Dinosaurs on BBC Earth (DStv 184), which takes viewers back into prehistoric times with six new-old dinos and their stories of parenting, migrating, hunting and trying to survive.
Bertie Carvel is the narrator of the new 6-episode Walking with Dinosaurs that is both a reimagining and an updated new version of the series - advancing what scientists know about that time and the creatures from so long ago, but also showing the updated technology being employed by modern-day archaeologists.
I recently spoke with Jay Balamurugan, series assistant producer and paleoartist for Walking with Dinosaurs.
Did you use AI or just the knowledge that palaeontologists have gathered to make estimated guesses?
We work very closely with them to know what sort of material we have in the ground.
So things like bones, and sometimes if dinosaurs are really well-preserved, we have things like muscle, skin - that sort of thing. If we have that, since some dinosaurs are preserved so well, we can even tell their colours because their pigment have been cell-fossilised. That is the best.
If we have that, that is gold. But if we don't, because a lot of dinosaurs are not super well-preserved, we can also look at modern relatives.
So birds today, modern dinosaurs today, were descended from the two-legged dinosaurs like Velociraptor and that sort of thing.
And we can look at what birds have today that they have in common with their distant ancestors to get a type of an idea.
It's never going to be perfect, but we do our best to work as closely with the scientists to get a really good, reasonable representation of what these animals look like.
'They really lived rich and vibrant lives -
each one with triumphs and defeats'
How long did it take to film and make this series?
It was actually quite a long process. I think about three years total in production. It took us anywhere from like six months to over a year to build even just the one dinosaur in VFX.
So we do a lot of things concurrently. We built multiple animals at once. The visual effects team would be building up these VFX models while we were out in the locations filming, so that everything could come together at the end.
It was really quite a long period of time and quite a challenge because, of course, we're not just doing the dinosaurs in the prehistoric world.
We're also filming palaeontologists on location. So it's almost like running two productions side by side. It's about three years in total.
How difficult was it to get access to all of these archaeological digs and were you guys surprised?
I think at the start we must have spoken to about 200 palaeontologists.
There are discoveries being made every day. I think there's something like 50 new dinosaur species being named every year.
There are a lot of parts of the world that are - even if historically they haven't been explored that much - nowadays with new technology, new science, we're able to go into these places and find new animals and new materials. So it was really surprising.
More institutions want to do work in there and more parts of the world become accessible.
Obviously, the dinosaurs evolved until they all died off. But you mentioned we still have birds.
Did it surprise you guys how palaeontology has evolved? It's quite astounding to see them using drones and they do 3D printing and scanning. It's no longer just sort of like on a rock.
That sort of field of study has also changed, it seems, radically.
Definitely it's something that has really developed. Like you mentioned the 3D printing - we actually 3D print a T-Rex brain in one of the episodes.
Because of that, we can actually determine, okay, it's got a big section dedicated to smell and taste. So we know for a fact it can smell really well. And then we can use that to learn more about its behaviour.
It's all smaller pieces to a very big puzzle. And with more and more technology over time, we're just getting closer and closer to that better picture of what dinosaurs really looked like.
'One of the more terrifying places
to be in prehistory'
In the second episode, it's about the T-Rex of Africa. And there's a sentence in there that was also new to me, where it says the Sahara was actually home to more large predators than anywhere else in history.
So that's a really interesting dilemma that palaeontologists have had.
When they dig up dinosaurs, there's maybe one or two, which is the ancient Sahara, about 100 million years ago, roughly, we find lots and lots of very big predators, really close together, which is really rare.
But what palaeontologists are slowly realising is that the reason they can all coexist is because they're all probably eating different things.
In that episode, we show Spinosaurus, which is one of the longest predatory dinosaurs, the big sailback. That's an animal that probably eats fish. And then you have this other animal, Carpodontosaurus, which looks a bit like T-Rex.
And that's something that's probably eating other big dinosaurs. And then we have a few other species that are probably eating all sorts of different things. So they're not directly competing with each other.
But it does make for probably one of the more terrifying places to be in prehistory.
Besides the special effects that have improved since the first series, what other things may be improved since the first Walking with Dinosaurs to help make this one look better or be more informed?
I think it really is that the show has traditional species-specific consultants and an up-to-date compendium of information on these animals.
This is truly the most accurate you'll have seen dinosaurs on TV so far, because this Walking with Dinosaurs incorporates the most amount of information.
We used reputable publications and fossil material and it was a lot of work, working with a lot of people. But it comes together to create something that's really quite a drastic difference from the original series back in 1999.
What would you say astounds you or moves you when you look back at the time so long ago?
I find the most incredible thing about these is that they were animals. They were real animals. They lived here. They died here.
And over such a huge period of time, they really lived rich and vibrant lives - each one with triumphs and defeats. It's just an untold number of stories that are buried in the rock, just waiting to be told.
And I think, to me, that's incredible. That's the greatest joy, is that we get to tell those stories. It's why I'm happy to be able to do this job.
Walking with Dinosaurs is on BBC Earth (DStv 184) with episodes also available on DStv Catch Up
