A Modern Jurassic Family

By James Poniewozik

You haven't seen an animal pee until you've seen Postosuchus lift its tail and issue a watery blast to mark its territory. Nor have you seen animal passion until you've seen two beefy Tyrannosaurs make eight tons of back-to-belly-bumpin' jungle love. And once you've seen Walking with Dinosaurs (Discovery, April 16, 7 p.m. E.T.), well, you still won't have seen real animals do any of that. But you'll come as close as technology allows. The critters in this three-hour special, which drew more than half the viewing audience when the BBC aired it last fall, are pure computer animation and animatronic puppetry. But unlike Jurassic Park's behemoths, Walking's dinos spend most of their time eating, mating and migrating in between the odd Allosaurus attack. Beastly but bucolic, they're virtual animals, not monsters.

This special-effects extravaganza is art, but is it science? The makers worked closely with paleontologists, choosing filming sites that matched dino-age flora and researching how specific species would have moved. Still, some experts have criticized Walking for presenting educated guesses as fact; there's limited evidence, for instance, about the social, mating and territorial habits it depicts. "We have found a few great fossils that give us a sense of behavior, but it's very little," says Mark Norell, chairman of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. "This stuff is just as fake as Jurassic Park."

Producer Tim Haines counters that Walking is just a digital update of what scientists have long done. "If you walk into a museum," he says, "you'll see pictures, murals, statues, skeletons, all of which are combinations of speculation and fact." Sometimes there was little fact to go on: What did dinosaurs sound like, for example? Haines chose "appropriate sounds for their size, weight and look." T. rexes roar; big, sluggish Placerias rumble. "If I gave them little chirruping noises, people would say, 'That's not very realistic.'" (We should know. We've seen Godzilla fight Rodan.)

Viewed sheerly as entertainment, Walking is part spectacle, part hoot. The dinos can be breathtaking from a distance, especially in the gorgeous underwater scenes; close-up, they're sometimes as convincing as the Sleestacks in Land of the Lost. The narration, while informative, can slip into corny anthropomorphism ("This female Utahraptor is up to no good!"), none of which undercuts the eternal coolness factor of the extinct. Last month Discovery's Raising the Mammoth drew 10.1 million people, the biggest cable-documentary audience ever, and Haines is at work on follow-ups. Thankfully, his stars may be able to crush spines in their powerful jaws, but they can't ask for raises.

--By James Poniewozik