Walking With Dinosaurs 2025

Among dinosaur documentaries, one name looms large over all others. The 1999 series Walking With Dinosaurs thundered onto television screens, taking the world of paleomedia by storm. Presented in the form of a nature documentary, it utilized a combination of CGI and practical effects to achieve its vision. Add in some iconic narration by Kenneth Branagh and music by Ben Bartlett, and you have the seminal series that raised a generation of paleonerds.

Walking With Dinosaurs went on to inspire a whole media empire of additional projects. There were several more tv series; Walking With Beasts (2001), Walking With Cavemen (2003), Sea Monsters (2003), and Walking With Monsters (2005). There was a live stage show with impressive animatronics called Walking With Dinosaurs: the Arena Spectacular, and finally there was a feature film in 2013, simply titled Walking With Dinosaurs.

With such a successful franchise history, it was perhaps inevitable that a revival series would come out eventually, but it was nonetheless a pleasant surprise to dinosaur lovers everywhere when the new series was officially announced.

Like the previous series, each episode focuses primarily on a specific individual, telling “a day in the life” type stories about them as they navigate their worlds. This time, however, the show also includes frequent cutaways to the modern day, as paleontologists uncover the fossil evidence that informs the depiction of different individuals and their behaviors.

I thought the paleontology segments made for an interesting addition to the series, making it that much more informative, but I did find them a bit obtrusive the way they kept interrupting the dinosaurs’ stories, at least at first. Whether they blended in better as the series progressed, or I simply got more used to them, I didn’t mind so much by later episodes. I do wonder whether these sequences might have worked better as framing devices, perhaps setting up a question or mystery at the start of the episode, then acting out a possible answer with the CGI dinosaurs, and then presenting the evidence at the end supporting that interpretation. The presentation of paleontology is a bit simplistic at times: casts of skeletons were presented as if they’d just been dug up in the field, and preparation work was generally skipped over. I suppose the case can be made for presenting things this way for laypeople, though I feel like there was a probably a way to do so that was slightly truer to form. In any case, I do like the selection of paleontologists they chose to feature, at least. They assembled a good collection of people, each with their own specialties, and it’s good to see them get some airtime.

The original series took a chronological approach to its tour of the Mesozoic, starting with the dawn of the dinosaurs in the Triassic Period, all the way to the end of the Cretaceous, with the meteor impact as the explosive finale. The new series randomly jumps around in time, almost exclusively in the Cretaceous, though the last episode takes place in the Jurassic. I did like the chronological structure of the original series. It felt like each episode built off one other, an aspect which is lost with the more anthology-like format of the new series. This doesn’t necessarily detract from the episodes themselves, though, and they tell their own stories well enough without reference to each other.

It’s hard not to compare the new Walking With Dinosaurs to its predecessor, and indeed, that seems to be the ultimate source of most complaints about it on social media. If one expects something in the same format as the original, I would say Prehistoric Planet has more of the feel of that series than the new one does. But perhaps it is unfair to focus on how much it “feels like Walking With Dinosaurs”, and we should instead treat it in isolation from its predecessor.

On its own terms, I thought WWD 2025 was quite good. It presented entertaining stories of prehistoric life, backed up with scientific evidence to support the narratives. The CGI perhaps doesn’t quite match the level of Prehistoric Planet, but it still looks good, and the models are highly accurate. In terms of both education and entertainment, it does far better than Life on Our Planet, and its modern segments tie in better as well. Walking With Dinosaurs 2025 delivers quality dinosaur entertainment and education, and it’s hard to ask for more than that. I think this series does well enough to get my Dino Dad Stomp of Approval. Walking With Dinosaurs is currently streaming on both the BBC and PBS websites.