Walking with Dinosaurs began a new era of natural history broadcasting when it landed on BBC One in 1999. Rejecting the received wisdom that factual telly couldn’t afford to create CGI dinosaurs as convincing as the ones from the Jurassic Park movies, it opened with Kenneth Branagh’s narration confidently claiming that we were about to be transported to the Earth as it was 65m years ago. Then it pulled off this incredible illusion.
In the quarter of a century that has elapsed since then, much has changed. Palaeontologists have advanced their knowledge, discovering new species and coming to the realisation that not all of their conjecture about what dinosaurs looked like was correct. Now, we know some of them had feathers, or fur, or were brightly coloured, when previously we’d envisioned them all as a uniform reptilian greeny-brown. And, in TV, the dream of making a dino show that is indistinguishable from nature programmes shot on live cameras in the present day (because the computer-generated monsters are so realistic) has got closer and closer.
