I’ve been under work pressure many times before, but nothing has prepared me for this. In Alberta, Canada on a palaeontology dig being filmed for the return of the BBC seriesWalking with Dinosaurs, I have been allowed to unearth a dinosaur bone.
It has not seen the light of day for about 73m years, and now, armed with just a hammer, awl and brush, I am chipping away at the rock around it to bring it to human eyes for the first time. One tap too hard in the wrong place and the fossilised bone could break.
Fortunately, I’m guided by more than just my recollections of the archaeology seriesTime Team. Overseeing me at Alberta’s Pipestone Creek Bonebed is leading Canadian palaeontologist Emily Bamforth, one of the advisers on the revival of WWD – the hit turn-of-the-millennium series which recreated extinct species through CGI and animatronics.
The bones we are excavating, Bamforth says, are thought to have been caused when a flash flood or fire engulfed a herd of horned, herbivore dinosaurs (found only in North America) called Pachyrhinosaurus. As if the poor creatures hadn’t suffered enough, they now have me trying to unearth them.
At first it is hard to differentiate between rock and remains. But Pipestone Creek Bonebed has one of the densest concentrations of dinosaur bones in the world, up to 200 bones per square metre. The prehistoric graveyard contains an estimated 10,000 creatures that will take more than a century to excavate – so it is not long before the “bone salad”, as one of the dig team calls it, is apparent.
Fortunately, with Bamforth’s guidance (and while humming theJurassic Parktheme tune under my breath) I complete my task without breaking anything. I then watch her team expertly remove a large bone from the ground using a plaster “jacket” to protect it during its journey to be cleaned and analysed in a laboratory at thePhilip J Currie Dinosaur Museumwhere Bamforth is curator.
Her work, and that of more than 200 palaeontologists around the world, has helped inform the look of the new WWD, with their discoveries informing the dinosaurs’ behaviours and appearance on screen.
A lot has changed since the Kenneth Branagh-narrated series first aired in 1999, including the fact that many people now believe dinosaurs, like dragons, did not actually exist. WWD showrunner Kirsty Wilson explains that talking to people while travelling during the two years of filming, she realised, “so many people … used to seeing [dinosaurs] in Jurassic Park etc … think of them as mythical animals”. One taxi driver even asked her if dragons are real.
Whether our post-factual world, AI or the popularity of TV series such asHouse of the Dragonare to blame, who knows? But Wilson hopes this series will disabuse people of that notion. She says whereas the original WWD “was purely visual special effects and animatronics [with] no dig sites involved at all, this time around, we’re … doing our homework for the audience to see. We wanted to feature the real science that goes on.”
Focusing on one individual dinosaur in each of the six episodes – now narrated by actor Bertie Carvel – is another difference from the 1999 original. This will, Wilson says, “bring to life really cracking stories that will keep everybody engaged. What we really hope is that people will be emotionally involved with these animals as real animals.” They range from a single dad Spinosaurus – the largest carnivorous dinosaur to walk the earth – to a lovesick, herbivore Lusotitan.
BBC Studios executive producer Helen Thomas says the genesis for reviving WWD was its 25th anniversary plus the runaway success in 2022 of a show she worked on calledDinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough, which used a prehistoric graveyard to tell the story of the demise of the giant reptiles.
Wilson explains: “We wanted to bring back WWD and tap into that nostalgia, legacy, and all the things that made the series so brilliant, but also completely reimagine it … bring it up to date and do something new and exciting with it.”
That includes the latest thinking about some dinosaurs’ appearance, which might prove a huge surprise. In the Currie Museum’s lab and collection, Bamforth and WWD assistant producer Sam Wigfield show me some of the fossils of leaves, skin, teeth and bone that have changed palaeontologists’ view of dinosaurs.
“In our Tyrannosaurus rex episode, the T rexes have lips, which is not a Jurassic Park feature because they want to show off all the teeth. But actually the growing consensus is they had lips, which is less Hollywood, but more scientifically accurate,” says Wigfield.
As well as showing that various dinosaurs were feathered, the reptiles will also be depicted in a much more exciting range of skin tones than the previous brown or green.
“In the natural world we see a vast array of very bright colours,” says Bamforth. “We worked with palaeontologists and experts to introduce flashes of colour … So we have Albertosaurus – terrifying predators – with pink eyebrows.”
To make the show more realistic, the computer-generated dinosaurs have been put against real-life locations similar to their own habitat. Crew members like Wigfield and production manager Emma Chapman acted out the parts of the creatures using cutouts, tape measures and tennis balls on poles so every move could be worked out. They even used pizza boxes on their feet to smooth over their tracks to save having to pay VFX specialists to “wipe out” their prints on screen.
Chapman – who has been instrumental in making the show’s logistics work – recounts another trick used to save VFX money: 3D-printing a giant blue screen dinosaur head to get the right ripples in water.
Getting moving water to look natural is expensive, so a 2-metre model of a Spinosaurus head was made and shipped to the filming location in Portugal. But she says even that was quite challenging, “because the director wanted it to sink, because a Spinosaurus swims. So we were in a swimming pool, burrowing holes in it to try to get this thing to sink!”
Due to fans’ love for the first series, there is “added pressure”, says Chapman, but after the release of the trailer, excitement is building among fans of the original – many of whom now have children and will bring a new generation to what Thomas calls the “BBC’s iconic intellectual property”.
With its worldwide appeal (the first series was watched by 700 million viewers globally) WWD is likely to make thePhilip J Currie Museuma TV tourism hotspot, particularly as it is offering “palaeontologist for a day” trips to go on a dig.
Speaking after my dig, Bamforth says she is “hopeful” WWD will make dinosaurs “more real for people” who may “struggle to understand that dinosaurs were real in the sense that animals today are real. It’s so long ago and they’re so alien to anything we have today.”
Walking withDinosaursairs on BBC One and iPlayer on 25 May