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The documentary series WALKING WITH DINOSAURS premieres its long-awaited second season on PBS, pbs.org, and the PBS app on Monday, June 16. While there hasn’t literally been an eon between them, the first series of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS aired in 1999, with the film WALKING WITH DINOSAURS 3D in 2013.

Produced by BBC Studios in conjunction with ZDF and France Télévisions, and narrated by Bertie Carvel, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS combines footage of real-life paleontology digs around the world and their finds with VFX recreations of how the dinosaurs looked, sounded and lived.

Andrew Cohen, one of the WALKING WITH DINOSAURS executive producers, won a BAFTA for the 2020 documentary THE SURGEON’S CUT. His many credits include multiple episodes of PBS NOVA, the 2011 documentary miniseries PLANET DINOSAUR, and the 2013 special THE SCIENCE OF DOCTOR WHO. He is part of the BBC’s Science Unit.

Paleontologist Dr. Emily Bamforth is curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. She and Cohen briefly crossed paths previously when she was interviewed for 2022’s DINOSAUR APOCALPYSE. Dr. Bamforth is featured heavily and was a consultant on Episode 5 of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS.

Speaking from separate locations, Dr. Bamforth and Cohen get on a Zoom call to talk with ASSIGNMENT X about their factual saurian trek.

For starters, what got them interested in dinosaurs in the first place?

“Mine is a lifelong love story,” Dr. Bamforth discloses. “I saw my first dinosaur skeleton when I was about four years old.” At that time, her family was in the U.K. “As family lore goes, that was when I decided I was going to be a paleontologist. So, I’ve been interested in dinosaurs literally my entire life.”

When Dr. Bamforth was six years old, her family moved to Edmonton, Canada. “I was one of those kids who had all the books and all the models, and I was lucky enough to live somewhere when I was growing up that was fairly close to a place where there were a lot of dinosaur fossils. So, as a young person, I had an opportunity to go and visit these places and actually see some of the fossils in the ground. That also had a big influence on me.”

Cohen’s interests are somewhat more wide-ranging, but they are dinosaur-affiliated, he says. “My whole career has been in science communication. And if you have a passion for science communication, and increasing the public understanding of science, then you have a passion for dinosaurs, because they are one of the most evocative, extraordinary areas of science to share with audiences.

“So, I’ve had many occasions over my career where I’ve been lucky enough to work with paleontologists like Emily, and to bring the very latest scientific understanding of dinosaurs to audiences.

“Personally, I’m like every other kid that I know, which is, you couldn’t help but when you were taken to your local natural history museum, I was lucky enough to live in London, and to see these fossils, and to imagine what those creatures would have been like. There is nothing more exhilarating than knowing that monsters are real. And so, that’s something that, like many, many people, it’s stuck with me my whole life.”

How did Cohen’s team come to hire Dr. Bamforth for WALKING WITH DINOSAURS? “We wanted to work with the very best paleontologists on the planet at some of the most exciting dig sites,” Cohen replies. “So, to be able to work with Emily and her team on the Pachyrhinosaurus site was an absolute no-brainer for us. And it worked in terms of the timings and the ability for us to get our teams together on this project.”

In terms of the overall production, Cohen says, “We have a brilliant team of science journalists within BBC Studios production, so we wanted to make sure that we were speaking to people who were very much involved in some of the most interesting paleontological digs going on at the moment. We obviously wanted people who could really communicate on camera, and we also wanted to have a real range of dinosaur characters that we were featuring, but also probably a couple of crowd-pleasers as well. It’s difficult to make a dinosaur series without having a T-rex.”

Dr. Bamforth nods in agreement.

“In production,” Cohen continues, “we spoke to over 200 paleontologists, talking to them about their active digs, before we came down to our six that we were lucky enough to gain access to and begin relationships with.”

This season of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, Cohen relates, “is based around six extraordinary active paleontological dig sites, and [each episode] tells the story of an individual animal that lived tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years ago.

“We’ve been able to bring a whole range of new understanding around dinosaurs that has accumulated over the last couple of decades, but also, what’s really exciting about this form of storytelling is that we can bring new discoveries that literally have come out of the ground whilst we were filming. And that’s been one of the really exciting things working with Emily and the other teams that are involved.”

“I was the lead paleontologist for Episode 5,” Dr. Bamforth elaborates, “which is called ‘The Journey North.’ That episode was centered around one of our dinosaur bone beds in the part of Alberta where we work. So, it was myself and my crew that were excavating it and, as Andrew said, even while they were filming, we were discovering new things, and some of those things that we found on camera were incorporated into the story, which was neat. It’s science in real time.”

The specific fossil belongs to a Pachyrhinosaurus. Dr. Bamforth explains, “The Pachyrhinosaurus is one of the horned dinosaurs, kind of a smaller, older cousin of the Triceratops. But what really makes them unique is, instead of having a horn on their nose, they have this huge bony mass, called a ‘boss,’ and they’re really the only dinosaur that has that.

“We know that they lived in these enormous herds, or at least, they migrated in these mega-herds of potentially thousands of animals. And the Pipestone Creek bone bed [in Alberta, Canada], that’s the site we found these things in, that was when we realized how huge these migrating herds of these horned dinosaurs could actually be. The species at Pipestone Creek is endemic, so they’re found nowhere else in the world. So, it is a very cool site.”

“One of the exciting things in this series,” Cohen adds, “is that I think it challenges people’s understanding of not just what the creatures looked like, but how they lived, how they behaved. In the episode about Pachyrhinosaurus, the idea of dinosaurs in such vast herds on a migration is not just an extraordinary spectacle, but it’s actually an extraordinary insight, a window into seeing a perspective on dinosaurs and how they lived.”

Asked about some of the other species covered in this season of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, Cohen goes into detail. “The first episode features a very young Triceratops. We think that she would have been around three years old, or even younger.

“The second episode, which was filmed in the Moroccan Sahara, where the dig site is, is about a creature called a Spinosaurus, which is an extraordinary, certainly water-loving – whether it was water-dwelling or not is still to be debated – fish-hunting predator that was actually larger than T-rex, just about, not by very much, but just about. It’s one of those creatures that I think is really capturing people’s and children’s imaginations at the moment.

“The third episode is about a spiky dinosaur called a Gastonia, a relatively young creature that we have been following the dig on, and tells the story of a group of Gastonia. And that episode has a really interesting relationship between our understanding of how those creatures died and the evidence that’s come out of the ground to let us know in incredible detail what happened to those creatures in the last moments of their lives.

“The fourth episode is about an Albertosaurus, which is a close relation of Tyrannosaurus Rex. That’s about a pack of teenage Albertosauruses. They struggle for their position within the pack.

“The fifth episode, as we’ve talked about, is Emily’s episode about Pachyrhinosaurus, and then the last one is about a creature that perhaps people haven’t heard the name of, but it’s called a Lusotitan, which is a close relation of the Brachiosaurus, a European-based sauropod, and is an extraordinary giant. We tell the story of a dig that we’ve been following in Portugal.”

Although the digs were both in Alberta, Dr. Bamforth notes, “The Albertosaurus is southern Alberta and the Pachyrhinosaurus are northern Alberta. So, same province, but actually separated by five hundred miles or something. Roughly the same time, late Cretaceous. There is about three million years, four million years difference. But generally speaking, geologically, same time,” she laughs.

“Not a lot of time for paleontologists, [but] a large amount of time,” Cohen observes.

In terms of visually and aurally creating the dinosaurs, is there new VFX technology that has been helpful?

“That technology advances by the day,” Cohen states. “We’ve been working with a company called Lola, who are the VFX producers, and they have a particular specialism in terms of being able to work with the scientific knowledge that we’re sharing, and craft that into these depictions of these animals that are the most scientifically accurate recreations that we can make. So, we’re using the very latest cutting-edge VFX technology. But even more than that, we’re using the science to fuel that, and to, we hope, make creatures that people can look at and really have a sense of the factual underpinning that has gone into producing this.”

Interacting with the VFX artists, Cohen continues, is “a process of a hundred, if not a thousand, questions and counter-questions. You have this beautiful flow of information, where we have really brilliant science journalists, and people who actually have experience in paleontology. We have a paleo artist called Jay Balamarugan on our team, and we’re looking to continually take the factual information that we can glean from Emily and her team and the other paleontologists and work to build a model that then gets tested, so, it’s a continual process over many, many months to come up with the most factually accurate depictions that we can.”

In terms of her relationship with the VFX team, Dr. Bamforth says, “I was, I guess, sort of a consultant. They would send me an image or a VFX model, and they’d say, ‘Is this correct?’ And I’d say, ‘The horns need to be a little bigger, the nasal boss could be bigger.’ So, in that sense, I was a fact-checker. I did see the models before they were actually put into the series. It’s the same thing with the sound. They sent me a whole bunch of sound bites, and they were like, ‘Is this what a Pachyrhinosaurus sounds like?’ ‘Yeah, sounds good to me’,” she laughs. “So, that aspect was a lot of fun as well.”

Cohen is happy that one aspect of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS is “taking you into the minds and the imaginations of paleontologists like Emily. When those bones are coming out of the ground, the whole point is to try and reimagine what those animals looked like and how they were living. And so, it’s almost as if we’ve gone inside the minds of paleontologists that produced this series, so that you can recreate those visions and that imagination from the evidence that is emerging.”

What is the most exciting thing Dr. Bamforth and Cohen have learned about dinosaurs over the course of making the series?

Cohen responds first. “There are so many new insights, for how the dinosaurs look, how they behaved. I just love the sequence in Episode 6, where we see this giant dinosaur, the Lusotitan. We understand from the foot imprints that were preserved that one of these creatures actually had a limp and survived. It would have been attacked, potentially it would have been injured, but certainly lived with a limp.

“I just think that very emotive sense of understanding that one of these giant creatures was actually not walking quite correctly, and we can see that in the rhythm of the prints that have been preserved, is a really beautiful insight, and an example that we see again and again in the series, of the paleontology leading us to not just understand the anatomy, the look of the dinosaurs, but also to give us an insight into behaviors. When you’re twenty-five meters long and weigh over forty tons, you’d imagine that you might be a bit of a target if you’ve got a limp. But obviously, whatever happened with this particular creature, they certainly survived for some time.”

Dr. Bamforth says she has learned, “so much. The great thing about paleontology is, it’s the science of discovery. We go into the field every day in the summer, and we never know what we’re going to find.”

She gives an example. “When we were out filming with WALKING WITH DINOSAURS that summer, we found a brain case of a Pachyrhinosaurus, a very distinctive-looking bone. We got all excited, because brain cases are fun to find. It was after they had come out to film that we realized this brain case was actually attached to a skull. It’s one of the biggest skulls that we’ve ever collected at Pipestone. So, that was totally unexpected. We had no idea that that was there, and this skull is actually turning out to be a very important skull. It’s got a lot of new features.

“So, it just goes to show that when we go out, we never know what we’re going to find, and every fossil has the potential to tell us something new, not only about this dinosaur, but also about the world in which they lived. That’s what I love about paleontology.”

And what would Cohen and Dr. Bamforth most like viewers to know about WALKING WITH DINOSAURS?

Cohen wants “them to know that they’re going to get an extraordinary insight, not just into the creatures, these extraordinary real-life monsters that lived on our planet – I shouldn’t be using the word ‘monsters,’ because they’re not all monsters. There’s that sense of, these are creatures of our imagination that actually existed, and I think to bring the very latest understanding of how those animals looked and behaved and combine that with the audience’s ability to actually find out how we know, to get them closer to the process of scientific discovery, is something that we’re incredibly excited to share in this series.”

Dr. Bamforth concludes, “For me, too, this series really highlights paleontology as a science, because it’s the story of these individual animals, but it also goes back and forth between [what is known and] how we know these things. I think it’s a phenomenal way to communicate not only the fact that these animals lived, but also how we know about how these animals lived. So, I’m really excited about that element as well.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview with Executive producer Andrew Cohen and paleontologist Dr. Emily Bamforth on WALKING WITH DINOSAURS

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