Why remake Walking with Dinosaurs? 'Our understanding of how they look has changed,' says expert

If Ibrahim's hunch is correct, the bone suggests the creature’s foot was paddle-shaped – this killer could swim. "The discovery rewrites the palaeontology textbooks," Ibrahim tells me, safely back at the University of Portsmouth where he lectures. "It’s doing things no other dinosaur is doing. It has a giant paddle tail, too, and an array of incredible anatomical features. It was a river dragon."

Thanks to the new BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, from which Ibrahim is the breakout star, there's no need for us to merely imagine. Employing the latest computer special effects [SFX], on-screen footage of Ibrahim’s dig morphs into a land of forests, waterways and skies patrolled by immense flying beasts. There, under a tree, we encounter the spinosaurus.

It has taken nearly three years to make the BBC’s reimagining of the ground-breaking original 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs. The first series – watched by more than 15 million viewers – concentrated on re-creating the past with visual effects; this time each of the six episodes begins with a different fossil dig that in turn generates a life-and-death story for, variously, triceratops, gastonia, albertosaurus, pachyrhinosaurus, lusotitan and the spinosaurus.

Locations include Montana and Utah in the US, Alberta in Canada and Pombal in Portugal. “The digs show the most exciting current palaeontology going on,” says Andrew Cohen, the series’ executive producer and head of BBC Science. “They are a time machine between the very place where those dinosaurs are being dug up now and the time when they lived and what they did when they were alive.”

Going back 100 million years, the Kem Kem region was a broad river system that teemed with monsters. “It was the most dangerous place in the history of our planet,” says Ibrahim. “Full of giant predators, several species of crocodile, dinosaurs, flying reptiles and predatory fish the size of an SUV. There were many different ways to die in this ecosystem. A human time traveller wouldn’t last very long.”

Today the region is a dry Saharan moonscape of shale-scattered ridges and a steep escarpment that the BBC crew, obliged to transport tons of equipment up its slopes, nicknamed Mount Doom. “It’s a very unforgiving place,” says Ibrahim. “A lot of time is just spent walking around the desert in scorching temperatures, looking for things sticking out of the ground, little bits of bone essentially, and it’s really hard work. There are sandstorms, snakes and scorpions.”

On the dig, German-Moroccan Ibrahim speaks Arabic with the locals, whom he’s keen to credit. "They are a really crucial part of the spinosaurus story," he says, "because the first few bones were found by a local fossil hunter".

In his early 40s, habitually in chinos and leather hat, there's more than a hint of Indiana Jones about Ibrahim, but it was another Steven Spielberg epic, the original 1993 film Jurassic Park, that first inspired the BBC to give dinosaurs the documentary treatment usually reserved for lions or elephants.

Ibrahim watched Walking with Dinosaurs as a young palaeontologist in Germany. "Some academics asked, ‘Should we really do this?’ But it inspired many people, including me.” Did the original get things wrong? "Well, that’s the nature of science, it’s based on new evidence coming in all the time. And I think they put a lot of effort into trying to get the anatomy of the creatures right.

"The dinosaur-bird transition is hinted at a little bit in the original series, but they were a little cagey about it because the evidence just wasn’t clear. Now, we have this incredible prehistoric menagerie of dinosaurs and dinosaur-like creatures and birds with feathers. We have a much richer painting in front of us in the new Walking with Dinosaurs."

Cohen was a young researcher at the BBC in the late 1990s and remembers "looking across the office at the people making Walking with Dinosaurs and seeing the excitement there". It seems audacious to remake such a major show, but Cohen thinks technological and scientific advances demand it. "Visual effects [VFX] have transformed in the last 25 years," he says. "Our understanding of how dinosaurs look has completely changed." Many dinosaurs are now known to have feathers. Advancements in palaeontology and paleobiology mean experts have been able to examine preserved skin, pigment and even internal organs.

The VFX dinosaurs are modelled digitally by London-based Lola Visual Effects, each creature’s development informed by a "bible", a compendium of all known information that runs to hundreds of digital pages and includes, says series showrunner Kirsty Wilson, "every step of our dinosaur creations from the translucency of their eyelids to the look of their toenails". The digital dinosaurs are then dropped onto the real-life filmed background – if you recognise a forest that’s because some scenes were shot in Scotland – where the movement in the bushes and ferns caused by a passing dinosaur was created by crew members dressed entirely in blue (including face masks) so they could be edited out later.

In comparison, the original Walking with Dinosaurs looks clumsy and fuzzily pixilated, but the two series do share a fondness for pulling at the heart-strings. Many millions of years ago the world was an unrelenting Darwinian struggle, yet both versions, 1999 and 2025, occasionally give into cuteness. In the new series, two lusotitans – 25-metre-long, 40-ton vegetarian giants that lived 150 million years ago – become romantically entangled.

Cohen says such dramatic narratives are backed up by the evidence of the digs. "Every single second of every single moment in the films is underpinned by a whole team looking at the facts," he says. "As far as some of the animals and their little quirks and behaviours, things like little dinosaurs looking for parents, or parents looking for their babies, we were very much led by what animals do today and what animals do in the fossil record."

Ibrahim hopes that the new Walking with Dinosaurs will inspire a fresh generation of young palaeontologists. "When I do a talk, kids tell me they’re concerned that all the cool dinosaurs have already been found and there’s not much to discover. I always tell them, 'Don’t worry, there are still many undiscovered treasures out there.' The percentage of dinosaurs we’ve found, in terms of the number that can actually be found, is quite small. The majority of finds are still out there."

A perfect illustration of that theory is the spinosaurus – it took a decade to unearth and piece together the 100-million-year-old fossils. The only previous example of its skeleton was discovered in the Egyptian Sahara by German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer just before the First World War, but was then destroyed when the RAF bombed Munich in April 1944. So how did it feel when Ibrahim dug up another one?

"It’s the ultimate experience for a palaeontologist," says Ibrahim. "People sometimes think of scientists as very detached, but the truth is we’re just as emotional as everybody else. We poured a lot of blood, sweat and tears into excavating this dinosaur." Appropriate words from a man whose work has taken us to a place that, despite the series’ occasional cute moments, was red in tooth and claw, and very bloody indeed.

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Walking with Dinosaurs begins on Sunday 25th May at 6:25pm on BBC One and iPlayer.

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