How Scientists & Filmmakers Brought Prehistoric Planet's Dinosaurs to Life

[Dr. Naish] Right now is the golden age of dinosaurs,

in terms of the scientific understanding of them.

Essentially have a new species of dinosaur every week.

We also have this entirely new understanding

of what the animals actually looked like

when they were alive.

[Tim] We try to show behaviors of dinosaurs

that are unexpected, and also unexpected dinosaurs.

[Narrator] Wired spoke with Tim Walker

and Dr. Darren Naish to explore how filmmakers

and scientists work together to bring

prehistoric species to life on screen.

[dramatic music]

In Apple's new doc series Prehistoric Planet,

filmmakers brought to life dinosaurs

in some ways we've never seen

and others for the very first time.

New research and discoveries about dinosaurs

in the last decade meant that filmmakers

needed to reconcile popular depictions

to the new research available.

Take the T-Rex.

[Tim] We have, what called, trace fossils.

And these are scrape marks which have been left

by theropod dinosaurs,

left in sediment on the bottom of waterways.

And when you look at the bones of a T-Rex,

they are air-filled.

If you reconstruct, in computer modeling,

the T-Rex body, all indicating that T-Rex

would've been a swimmer.

The Tyrannosaurus and other predatory dinosaurs

they almost certainly didn't have

the kind of crocodile-like faces.

Scientific evidence currently indicates

that these animals actually had quite a lot

of soft tissue on the face.

They would have structures that we call lips,

but they're not lips like what we have,

they're more like the lips of lizards and snakes.

Lots of depiction of dinosaurs,

they're like super bodybuilders when we see them.

But in reality, when you look across the animal kingdom

and you see animals that have a healthy lifestyle,

they are often very different to how you depict dinosaurs.

So our T-Rex is quite chunky.

[Narrator] In addition to re-imagining fan favorites

like the T-Rex, the team depicted 12 rarely seen species.

[Tim] What could be cooler, dinosaurs and snow.

There's a wonderful dinosaur called Nanuqsaurus,

which is a type of Tyrannosaur.

It would've been perfectly adapted to its environment.

The Nanuqsaur is rather cunning.

It looks amazing as well.

Olorotitan is a type of Hadrosaur.

The name means giant swan neck.

It's a beautiful creature.

We show it moving into a nesting area where

it ultimately uses geothermal energy

to incubate the eggs.

[Dr. Naish] So we've known since the 1980s

that there were dinosaurs of all kinds,

large and small, living in the far north and the far south.

[Narrator] But a 2021 discovery of baby dinosaur bones

in Alaska, pushed researchers to consider

that dinosaurs lived year-round in the cold.

[Dr. Naish] So these were animals that must have coped

with seasonal polar darkness

and freezing cold temperatures and thick snow.

It's entirely new, it's entirely radical

to most of the people that are gonna see the episode,

but it's absolutely scientifically legit.

[Tim] So we kick the episode off with giant

Titanosaur sauropods called Dreadnoughtus.

We then see incredibly adorned Pterosaurs

called Barbaridactylus,

and we close the episode with a wonderful story

about Secernosaurus traveling across sand dunes.

Dreadnoughtus is a South American Titanosaur,

it's got a huge long neck, really long tail, massive.

[Dr. Naish] The giant plant-eating dinosaurs

were probably the most dangerous of the dinosaurs.

Think about the living world,

there's no such thing as a gentle giant,

they're the animals you stay away from.

[Tim] Barbaridactylus is a fabulous animal

that features in the deserts episode.

It's a Pterosaur that's got a huge, huge headcrest.

You know, if we look in the animal kingdom,

anytime that an animal has something

which doesn't really have a mechanical function,

usually always associated with some kind of display purpose,

usually for attracting a mate, or warding off rivals.

We show Velociraptor looking very different

to what people have got used to seeing

over the last few years.

Velociraptor was 'round about the size

of a big turkey, and covered in feathers.

Still had a big claw,

so it'd be a pretty vicious Turkey.

Throughout Prehistoric Planet,

we don't just feature dinosaurs.

So dinosaurs were quite a specific group

of animals that lived on land.

The things in the air we call Flying Reptiles

and the things in the water we call Marine Reptiles.

These specialized Marine Reptiles,

none of them laid eggs.

They gave birth to live babies in the water.

This kind of Plesiosaur, Tuarngisaurus,

and we've been able to show they give birth

in our coasts episode, by a discovery,

it's actually a fossil that's on display

in Los Angeles County Museum,

where there's a pregnant plesiosaur.

So we know for sure that plesiosaurs

like Tuarngisaurus, gave birth to these giant babies.

Now, if you give birth to a giant baby,

and again this is something seen across the animal world,

they generally undergo parental care.

So we've got very good reason for thinking

that plesiosaurs, like Tuarngisaurus,

lived in complex family groups, looked after their babies.

Now in the last several decades

there's actually been a scientific revolution.

Kaikafilu is a Mosasaur.

People used to show mosasaurs as kind of like

crocodile-like animals, that is completely wrong.

Beautiful fossils, all discovered

since about the year 2000 have shown

that they were more like kind of whale lizards.

They were these big, chubby, streamlined animals

and they had a vertical tail fin, kind of like a shark.

One of the frogs that lived in the Late Cretaceous,

specifically in Madagascar, was probably

the most remarkable frog ever.

It's called Beelzebufo, this predatory broad-bodied frog.

It looks kind of similar to the modern

Pacman frogs and the Pixie frogs.

Scientists have worked out, based on the bite strength

of living frogs, that Beelzebofu would've bitten

at a strength of 'round about 2000 Newtons.

It's about the same as the bite force

of like a lion or a tiger.

So a frog that can grab, like, an animal

like a small dinosaur, subdue it with

this really powerful bite force, and then eat it.

Masiakasaurus, you know, when we see it

it's got babies with it,

we've got a giant toad and we've got some

baby dinosaurs and kind of guess what happens.

I think a lot of people think that dinosaurs

lived in swamps or in deserts,

but we know that the planet was

covered in a lot of forest and that dinosaurs

were found in those forests.

A cool one, we feature is Qianzhousaurus.

which is a type of tyrannosaur.

It's got a colloquial name, which is Pinocchio Rex,

'cause it's got a really elongated snout,

and we show it in association with a beautiful

dinosaur called Corythoraptor.

[Dr. Naish] The conventional view of dinosaurs

that's still really familiar to us

through most mainstream media

is that dinosaurs were boring and brown

and pretty ugly animals and all they did

was roar each other and attack each other.

Dinosaurs, non-bird dinosaurs were showy,

flamboyant, often attractive animals.

They would've been sending signals to each other,

you know, head shakes and arm waving and tail wiggling,

all this kind of stuff all the time.

So if you were lucky enough to travel back

in time to see these animals in life

you would be just blown away

by how showy and amazing they were in appearance.

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