I grew up in the heyday of dinomania. Honestly, looking back, I don’t know how I could have avoided growing up to be a nerd obsessed with the long-dead reptiles. And when I wasn’t reading books about dinosaurs, asking to see them at the museum, playing with dinosaur toys, drawing dinosaurs, asking my teachers about dinosaurs, and otherwise living a life out of the pages of The Berenstain Bears and the Dinosaurs, I was watching dinosaurs on TV. “The Great Dinosaur Hunt” on The Infinite Voyage, Christopher Reeve appearing in the gloomy halls of the AMNH for Dinosaur!, Walter Cronkite talking about T. rex sexual dimorphism in A&E’s Dinosaur!, the iconic animation of PBS’ The Dinosaurs!, and more, I watched them all and watched them again, always happy when basic cable educational tv ran a block of dinotainment on a weekend afternoon.

But we live in a different era of dinosaur shows. The original Walking With Dinosaurs changed the field forever. It was so evocative that when Prehistoric Planet expanded on the “let’s just watch the dinosaurs in nature” premise a few years ago, it did so well that Walking With Dinosaurs came out of retirement. And now we meet a new offering, Netflix’s The Dinosaurs. With such a buffet put out in front of me, the time’s right to dig into these 21st century dinosaur offerings - and to take a look at some old favorites. So, for you today, I have the first entry in a weekly series looking at the latest and greatest of dinosaur TV.*