1999 is a long, long time ago…
Caption: a now iconic image from the 1999 BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs.
At least some of today’s interest in the life of the distant geological past was inspired by, or is connected to, the highly successful and critically acclaimed BBC TV series Walking With Dinosaurs (WWD from here). WWD first screened in 1999, its backstory involving a daring proposal made by executive producer and series creator Tim Haines who made successful funding pitches to the BBC, BBC Worldwide and Discovery. Tim, of course, was inspired by the effective use of CG dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park.
Caption: how I would have liked to have worked on WWD… but the timing just wasn’t right. At left, myself and Tim Haines at an event ('The evolution of monsters in the garden of England'!) in 2009. At right, Tim and I during one of the Dinosaurs in the Wild parties of 2017. Despite appearances, I wasn’t working as a bouncer at the time.
As regular readers of this blog might already know, I have, over the course of the last 15-ish years, been in the fortunate position both of working (during 2007) at Tim’s company Impossible Pictures and (between 2016 and 2018) of working closely with Tim himself for the duration of the travelling exhibition Dinosaurs In The Wild. I got to quiz Tim quite closely about WWD during those associations and learnt a lot.
Caption: Dinosaurs in the Wild, a descendant of WWD.
What I might not have spoken about so much is that I was also, during the late 1990s, part of a palaeontological research group where our principal investigator (Dr David Martill, these days Prof Martill) was one of the main scientific consultants and, furthermore, main scientific advocates of WWD itself. Combined, these things put me in an unusual position whereby I got to witness and experience a fair amount of ‘behind the scenes’ WWD development. I figure that now’s the time to share stories about what happened.
There are some big disclaimers here that I’d like you to remember. One is that what I’m about to describe is an extremely provincial, idiosyncratic, personal view that is in no way intended to be the actual story of how WWD came together. Said actual story was obviously a long-running, complex one involving a great many people, some not mentioned here at all. Another is that I’m not in any way intending to convey the impression that I was involved in, or had any influence on, things that came to pass. I’m describing things as a bystander, not an active participant.
Caption: the beautiful and picturesque Burnaby Building, University of Portsmouth. It is here where some early, pivotal meetings directing the fate of WWD would have occurred. This image is actually a screengrab from a Nat Geo documentary. Portsmouth is, as might be obvious, famous for its brutalist architecture.
Dreams of plesiosaurs. So, to work. We must imagine ourselves in the distant, dim, geological past: an era known as the late 1990s, when I was spending what time I could in the palaeolab of the University of Portsmouth’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (as it was known at the time), ostensibly working on Early Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs. It was in the latter part of 1997 that Dave would mention discussions he was having with people in TV-land about the lifestyle and biology of plesiosaurs.
These variously involved reproduction (I was an advocate even then of the idea that plesiosaurs were viviparous), the ‘hydrodynamically driven olfaction’ model published earlier by Arthur Cruickshank and colleagues (Cruickshank et al. 1991), and ideas about plesiosaur swimming, the favourite model at the time being Frey and Riess’s ‘alternating downstroke’ model (Frey & Riess 1982, Tarsitano & Riess 1982, Riess & Frey 1991). I had thoughts on all those things (I deliberately approached Dave as a potential supervisor because I’d hoped to work with him on Mesozoic marine reptiles) but I don’t think any of the ideas or arguments I put to him affected the pilot…
Caption: the WWD Liopleurodon head, currently on show at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Image: Darren Naish.
Yes, the pilot! The… what? Yes, Dave was working (under a reasonable degree of secrecy) as consultant for a marine-themed pilot episode of what was to become Walking With Dinosaurs. Dave had sufficient faith in the project that he provided his services on the pilot for free, the deal being that – if the pilot succeeded – he’d then be involved throughout. Other consultants were not yet involved.
At this time, the series didn’t have a name, and the decision to start off with a marine-themed episode – an idea pushed by Dave – was chosen in order to keep costs to a minimum. It’s easier to film models in water and put CG constructs in watery scenes than depict anything on land, obviously. A concern that a Jurassic marine episode might not have enough superstars led to Dave’s recommendation that they include the theropod Eustreptospondylus.
Caption: episode 3 of WWD – ‘A Cruel Sea’ – is essentially the TV version of Martill and Hudson’s book Fossils of the Oxford Clay. The WWD role of such animals as Liopleurodon and Eustreptospondylus is owed to their appearing in the Oxford Clay fauna.
Needless to say, most of the material prepared for the pilot successfully made it into the final product (as in, the televised TV series). Some of it didn’t, since the team opted to change the way in which things were portrayed. At one point in the pilot, the Liopleurodon’s head was shown in partial x-ray such that the inner workings of the nostrils and nasal chamber could be better explained. This was eventually abandoned as a more ‘natural history’ aesthetic came to dominate. I think this segment (showing the partial x-ray) survived in a ‘making of’ documentary.
I also recall Dave explaining how the way in which some complex ideas were explained for TV was – in his opinion – kinda boring, his exhibit A being that the ‘alternating downstroke’ model for plesiosaur locomotion was best conveyed via human actors who might be shown lying on their bellies and flapping their limbs up and down. Believe it or don’t, a sequence for WWD showing Dave behaving in exactly this way (though perhaps standing rather than lying down) was filmed and I recall seeing it.
Caption: the ‘alternating downstroke’ model for plesiosaur locomotion, developed by Frey & Riess (1982), Tarsitano & Riess (1982) and Riess & Frey (1991), was promoted as the ‘best’ model to use for WWD. These days we don’t favour it so much, partly because it would result in colliding vortices but also because it’s less efficient and less successful than other options available to these animals (see Muscutt et al. 2017). Images: Riess & Frey (1991) at left, Tarsitano & Riess (1982) at right.
A 1998 conference screening. Fast forward a few months, and it was obvious by late 1998 that what was underway was kind of a big deal. I was (so far as I recall today) generally clueless on the whole endeavour, all of which shows that Dave was behaving properly and keeping things secret.
A key member of the WWD team was computer effects expert Mike Milne of the London-based company Framestore, and due to arrangement made by Dave, he was invited to give an evening ice-breaker talk at the 46th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), held at the University of Bournemouth in September 1998.
Caption: great image of Mike Milne, I think photographed at Impossible’s old office on Great Portland Street. That office was on the second floor, so the sauropod poking through the window must have been on a floating platform. Note the copy of Czerkas and Czerkas’s Dinosaurs: a Global View on the desk. Image from here.
This might have been the first talk Mike gave on the topic, or maybe it was already one of many… I don’t know. Anyway, I remember a few details in particular. One is Mike saying that he initially turned the project down as unfeasible (for financial reasons), then realised that he’d regret it if he later learnt that someone else said yes. It was this that caused him to change his mind. The most memorable thing about the talk is that we were shown a number of CG sequences. I have no idea how much (if anything) was finished at this stage, but my feeling is that things were mostly a long way from completion. That would be consistent with timing, since delivery was presumably still more than a year off.
I remember seeing erect-necked sauropods: an interesting thing, given that WWD’s sauropods would eventually look very different due to the involvement of sauropod neck expert Kent Stevens. Mike also showed an animation sequence in which a reclining Allosaurus – untextured and uncoloured, except for default monotone grey – was shown indulging in a few actions. It lifted its leg and proceeded to lick its genital area, as if it were a cat or dog.
Caption: a scene from the pilot, in which vertical-necked sauropods browse from the tops of trees. Needless to say, nothing like this appeared in the final series.
Mike also showed a more fully rendered scene in which a greenish allosaur-type theropod was shown walking through a vegetated landscape while small, hypsilophodont-type dinosaurs moved or ran out of its way. The dinosaurs didn’t make any noise but Lou Reed’s Perfect Day (I think the sycophantic 1997 cover version produced by the BBC) blared loudly in accompaniment. Mike explained that, while this music might have seemed irritating to us (an engaged audience who would observe things keenly, music or not), it was a necessary evil, since Mike and his colleagues had learnt that music was a must in order that they retain the attention of the executive-type people they were often showing things to.
The talk ended and there was the opportunity for questions. Palaeontologists in general are (in my experience) mostly positive about honest efforts to bring prehistoric animals to life, especially so when the makers of said efforts have gone to trouble to pay attention to the science.
Don Henderson asked why the theropods had been made as ‘stooping’ as they had. I don’t recall the answer, but it’s obvious that he had a point. Some of the WWD theropods walk with their bodies sloping down and hands almost touching the ground. Derek Yalden (who’s no longer with us; he died in 2013) noted that the theropod’s walking cycle hadn’t been animated correctly: he opined that theropods walked by rotating each limb out sideways and throwing it around in a circle before planting the foot on the ground. I was surprised to hear this since it didn’t match my understanding of theropod locomotion at all. I was pleased to hear Don later say that Derek was repeating something that was hardly up to date. It was, in fact, completely wrong.
Caption: assorted WWD-themed palaeomedia, most of which we’ll meet in the next article. Image: Darren Naish.
I was later to hear Mike give another version of this talk at an event at the Geological Society of London (GSL), but this one was years later, and part of the reason I know that is because I recall Mike discussing Primeval (which ran from 2007 to 2011). This reminds me to make an interesting point: in his GSL talk, Mike said that he and his colleagues had effectively been forced to move on to things like Primeval since TV companies and executives are – post-WWD – no longer interested in funding fact-based documentary series on prehistoric life. This was surely true for a time. But is it true today? Well…
We’ll stop there for now. Part 2 will appear soon! UPDATE: part 2 now online here.
For other TetZoo articles on some of the topics mentioned here, see…
Sauropod dinosaurs held their necks in high, raised postures, May 2009
The changing life appearance of dinosaurs, September 2014
The Unique and Efficient 4-Flipper Locomotion of Plesiosaurs, August 2017
Dinosaurs in the Wild: An Inside View, July 2018
The Last Day of Dinosaurs in the Wild, September 2018
The Life Appearance of Sauropod Dinosaurs, January 2019
The Sixth TetZooCon, October 2019
The Netflix Series Alien Worlds, January 2021
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Refs - -
Cruickshank, A. R. I., Small, P. G. & Taylor, M. A. 1991. Dorsal nostrils and hydrodynamically driven underwater olfaction in plesiosaurs. Nature 352, 62-64.
Frey, E. & Riess, J. 1982. Considerations concerning plesiosaur locomotion. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Palaontologie 164, 193-194.
Riess, J. & Frey, E. 1991. The evolution of underwater flight and the locomotion of plesiosaurs. In Rayner, J. M. V. and Wootton, R. J. (eds) Biomechanics and Evolution. Cambridge Uni. Press (Cambridge), 131-144.
Tarsitano, S. F. & Riess, J. 1982. Plesiosaur locomotion - underwater flight versus rowing. Neues Jahrbuch fur Geologie und Paläontologie 164, 188-192
