Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) is an impressive sequel to the original. It must have been 1999 or 2000, and somewhere in a living room in the Netherlands, little Hessel was watching the television with bated breath. This television screen showed the life of dinosaurs from millions of years ago. As a child, I found dinosaurs fascinating and the documentary Walking with Dinosaurs only strengthened that fascination. And I still have that fascination as an adult. It is difficult not to let your imagination be stimulated by the idea that our world once had giant reptiles walking around.
A few years ago, in a review of Prehistoric Planet, I said that Walking with Dinosaurs had a worthy successor. Now, the BBC is making their own sequel with a new version of their award-winning documentary. Using new film techniques and new knowledge, dinosaurs are brought back to life on the small screen, and we get six different glimpses into a world that has been gone for millions of years.
Each episode follows a different team of paleontologists as they dig up a dinosaur fossil somewhere in the world. Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) then shows what the life of the dinosaur in question might have been like. The stories we see include a young Triceratops trying to survive in a forest full of predators, an ancient Lusotitan (a giant long-necked dinosaur in layman's terms) looking for a mate, and the swimming hunter Spinosaurus crossing a dangerous river delta with its young in search of food.
The dinosaurs look mostly nice, with the occasional flaw
The dinosaurs that the BBC has brought to life look beautiful for the most part. However, at a few moments it is very clear that computer animation has been used, especially in fast animations. Prehistoric Planet has set the bar very high and comes out on top in this comparison. Nevertheless, the BBC has created something impressive and there is enough to enjoy visually. Bertie Carvel also has a very nice calm narrator's voice that brings the whole thing together. He may not be David Attenborough (Prehistoric Planet), John Hurt (Planet Dinosaur) or Kenneth Branagh (the original Walking with Dinosaurs), but he does a very good job.
The BBC also made interesting choices about which dinosaurs they wanted to highlight. Of course, it is almost obligatory to show a Triceratops and a Tyrannosaurus rex and we are treated to that in the first episode. But we see so much more than that. Science has not stood still in the past twenty-six years. Paleontologists are describing more and more dinosaurs and we continue to learn about the lives of the species we already know. Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) deliberately shows dinosaurs and habitats that scientists have recently discovered more about.
Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) reveals interesting new insights about dinosaurs
In recent years, paleontologists have gained a lot of new knowledge about the body structure and lifestyle of Spinosaurus. Initially, this predator was mainly seen as a kind of T-rex with a sail on its back (as seen in the third Jurassic Park film). Today, new excavations and new research have shown us that this dinosaur was highly adapted to water and may have lived more like a crocodile than a land predator. This new knowledge is also excellently presented in the episode in question. The same applies, for example, to Pachyrhinosaurus (a distant cousin of Triceratops), fossils of which were found in northern Alaska in 2013.
Furthermore, Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) shows the necessary scientific justification. We see how fossils are excavated and what knowledge paleontologists gain from this. It is good that attention is paid to this and where the assumptions come from. But still, the scenes with the paleontologists took me out of the story a bit and that is a pity. In the second season of Prehistoric Planet, this was only shown at the end of each episode, and I thought that was a rather elegant solution.
My fascination with dinosaurs has been given a big boost. The new version of Walking with Dinosaurs (2025) is a must-see for anyone who enjoyed the original or Prehistoric Planet. It's a shame that only six episodes were made, because I think there is much more to tell about life millions of years ago. For now, I'm hoping for a second season. I also wouldn't say no to a new version of the sequel Walking with Beasts, about the rule of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
About the writer, Karzal
Mike (1995) has been a member of MySeries since 2016 and is mainly active on the English version of the site. Since 2018, he has been actively translating news articles, columns, reviews and basically everything that ends up on the Dutch site. The original articles, columns and reviews were actually written by others. During the week Mike can be found at IKEA, where he is a national systems specialist and occasionally also in the classroom to teach an English lesson. In addition, Mike logically enjoys watching series and has actually been spoon-fed this from an early age. The genre doesn't matter, there is a place for everything in the otherwise busy life.
