- [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.
[dramatic music]