Back to the Age of the ‘Dinosaurs’

It looks and sounds like a typical TV wildlife documentary, with cameras surveying animals in their natural habitat, and the calm, objective voice of a narrator explaining their actions.

But look and listen again. The creatures under scrutiny actually died out nearly 70 million years ago; what we are seeing is real photographed landscapes, inhabited by prehistoric animals created by computer animation.

This original idea, both simple and sophisticated, has made “Walking With Dinosaurs” a global TV phenomenon. The $9.6-million miniseries, created in Britain by the BBC and co-funded by the Discovery Channel, arrives in the U.S. with a three-hour premiere on Discovery Sunday.

“Walking With Dinosaurs” has already been sold into some 30 international TV territories, and has attracted sky-high ratings in most of them, including Australia, Germany and Portugal. When it debuted in Britain last fall, some 13 million people tuned in. That’s about a quarter of the entire population. No wonder it has been billed as the biggest thing on TV in 200 million years.

Series producer Tim Haines predicts: “It may be the most popular science documentary ever.”

Haines is eager to stress the word “science.” Though he is a qualified zoologist, “Walking With Dinosaurs” is not a wildlife or natural history series. It is specifically science programming, using computer-generated imagery to create the Tyrannosaurus rex, diplodocus, torosaurus and their gigantic cousins; a team of eminent paleontologists was consulted to reinforce what is known for certain about dinosaur history with their reasoned speculation.

So the series traces the era in which dinosaurs roamed the Earth--a period of some 170 million years--with a series of mini-dramas. We see cynodonts (an early evolutionary link between reptiles and mammals) abandoning their burrows and heading for extinction when they are discovered by the coelophysis--a precursor of dinosaurs. Later, many dinosaurs, among them the appealing young diplodocus, perish in a forest fire started by lightning.

“We could have made the stories even stronger,” Haines said. “Yet it might have looked like we were outrageously manipulating things, and since we’re manipulating anyway by ‘creating’ these dinosaurs, we didn’t want to do that.”

But the series can be watched as a story. It’s designed so that it gives a mass of information, so people are learning as they watch. But it’s not meant to make people aware they’re being educated.

It will come as no surprise that Haines concedes the germ of the idea for “Walking With Dinosaurs” was Steven Spielberg’s 1993 megahit film, “Jurassic Park.” Haines suggested the series in the spring of 1996, and he and his creative team at the BBC started work on it around the time “Lost World,” Spielberg’s sequel, had just opened.

“We were aware that the most potent dinosaur images came from Hollywood,” Haines said. “But in films they have to be monsters, and they have to have vindictive attitudes toward humans. We felt it was important to take humans out of the picture, and show dinosaurs mating and feeding in their natural habitat, without their actions being part of any moral issue.”

Every single shot of “Walking With Dinosaurs” was story-boarded. Two-person documentary camera crews were dispatched across the world to size up scenery that might be a suitable backdrop for the dinosaurs, visiting California redwoods, Chilean volcanic fields and the jungles of New Caledonia. “We’d survey the terrain, and at first shoot nothing, but take measurements, note the angle of the camera and the lenses used,” Haines recalled. Then a team of 15 animators at the London-based company Frame-Store scanned their dinosaurs, created from scale models, into computers. They looked at how the dinosaurs fit the terrain, suggested revisions, then the camera crews returned to shoot.

“The worst bit was cutting it all together before the dinosaurs were superimposed,” Haines recalled. “It was just shot after shot of greenery.”

Though what appears on TV screens is clearly a fabrication, Haines is relieved there has been relatively little criticism about the authenticity of “Walking With Dinosaurs,” with its blend of provable facts and sheer conjecture.

“As a point of scientific debate it’s fascinating,” he noted, “because the whole of paleontology is like that. In pure scientific terms you can’t be definite. It’s all about degrees of certainty. Nothing in the series is provably wrong. If you find a tooth of a Tyrannosaurus embedded in a triceratops hip, he could have bitten that hip, so he could be a carnivore. It seems likely, but we can’t be sure. How long did dinosaurs incubate their eggs? If there’s no fossil evidence, you go to living relatives. You look at crocodiles and birds, consider their size, the laws which govern them and you make an educated guess.

“We’ve taken great care to be as accurate as we can. If I were a drama producer, I wouldn’t care, but I’m a science producer, so I do.”

The series took almost three years to make.

“I rather hoped it might do well,” Haines said, “but obviously none of us had any idea it would have this popularity.”

He has his own theories about the apparently timeless appeal of these prehistoric giants: “Dinosaurs are representative of the power of nature when man wasn’t around. We have no guilt about them, because they were extinct long before humans. But they show how great nature could have been in another, earlier era. In real life, they’d have been absolutely extraordinary to see.”

*

* “Walking With Dinosaurs” can be seen Sunday at 7 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. The three-hour miniseries repeats at 10 p.m. “The Making of Walking With Dinosaurs” can be seen Monday at 9 p.m.