In the distant future, the year 2000, my high school history teacher wheeled in the miraculous bulk of the media cart. Movie day. But even better, because technically prehistory is part of history, we were going to watch Walking With Dinosaurs.

It’s hard to overstate how big a deal the show was at the time. When the first episode aired in England, 15 million people watched. The show was incredibly expensive to produce, yes, but the results were award-winningly undeniable. The epic dinosaur show gave us everything from spinoffs, sequels, and imitators but also, of course, the magical Liopleurodon.

Walking With Dinosaurs prepared the ground for its own revival. Paleo narrative has been cresting for the past several years, certainly with the success of Prehistoric Planet and, I’d like to think, my last few books. People are hungry for stories about prehistory, and, if episode one is any indication, Walking With Dinosaurs improves on the formula it created.

I’ll tell you the truth. As much as I enjoyed the original Walking With Dinosaurs, I missed the science. I wanted to see the fossils that the animals on screen were based on. I wanted to see the places they came from. See someone in the field or in a lab tell me something about them, whether as an end cap or interspersed through. I wanted to know how real fossils were telling us things we never knew before. Especially because sometimes documentaries highlighted cool fossils in collections that were not on display anywhere. Little did I know that the 2025 iteration of Walking With Dinosaurs would fulfill my personal wish.

The first episode, “The Orphan,” centers on a three-year-old Triceratops nicknamed “Clover” - and based on an actual fossil specimen being excavated by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Our protagonist isn’t a generalization of made up out of thin air, but based, however tenuously, on an actual animal that comes from a specific place and is our ambassador to a specific time. The show revels in the connection. In a beautiful transition, the cracks along the surface of one Clover’s bones morph into the streams among the lush Hell Creek landscape of 66 million years ago.

Bouncing back and forth between discoveries and restorations of Clover and her world, the show gives viewers grounding for everything being brought to life. A drone survey that reveals a large bone brings up the subject of Edmontosaurus, who then appears in the show. The science storyline and the narrative are threaded well, even when it gets a little Jurassic Park silly.

Some of the science cutaways feel a little contrived, such as a 3D printer in camp that makes an orange and blue print of a Tyrannosaurus brain. I suspect the show is trying to cram in as much as possible about how we know what we know. Because in the field, we often know less than these shows let on. Sometimes the identification isn’t any more specific than “big bone” or “hadrosaur” until the fossils are cleaned off in the lab. So perhaps techniques more appropriate to the lab are brought into the field just to streamline the story and prevent a further jump. We are staying in the desert and imagining the dinosaurs as they’re coming out of the ground, so the tech can come to camp. I don’t mind that, but it is always worth noting what these shows make field life look like. It’s often programs like this that introduce the public, future volunteers, about what to expect - so we can’t be surprised when someone comes out to the field for the first time asking about the 3D printer and blacklight drone.

As for Clover’s story itself, the story veers between the scientifically demonstrative and slightly-too-anthropomorphic. Clover’s search for other dinosaurs to hang out with exists at the tension of these two poles.

Juvenile Triceratops are very rare, and Triceratops in general, whether young or adult, are usually found alone. The dinosaurs are not found in multi-age herds like the centrosaurs that lived in Laramidia 10 million years earlier. It seems young Triceratops were either alone or formed small social groups when they could. Clover’s urge to find company, then, does have a solid science thread. But when little Clover gambols and nuzzles a baby Edmontosaurus among a herd of the shovel-beaks, the program feels a little too Land Before Time.

I can hardly knock the show for doing what every natural history documentary of this type does, however, where storylines, heroes, villains, unfortunate victims, and more are all selected from existing footage and are an interpretation of nature rather than nature itself. Walking With Dinosaurs exists to tell us about the dinosaurs, focused on the surprising and novel. Doing so must let story lead, otherwise the show would be a wildlife cam where nothing much might happen over the course of the hour.

Of course I could quibble about a few more things. I’m a dinosaur fan. Quibbling is where we live. We all have a vision of the past that is precious to us and backed up by what we know. It’s easy to say “That’s not how I see it.” The more important point, I think, is whether Walking With Dinosaurs accomplishes what it sets out to do. I think it does, and it does so beautifully. We get a sense of camp life, where these fossils are from, what the animals might have looked like, the kind of techniques paleontologists might use to understand their discoveries, and, best of all, a look at a tyrannosaur coprolite that I hope gets described soon. The show draws the living animals out from the bones, drawing our attention piece by piece to the anatomy and behaviors of our favorite extinct reptiles. If this is what the show has on offer, I’m very much looking forward to the next installment.