We can't actually go "Walking With Dinosaurs," but the Discovery Channel's docu-mentary by that title is an astounding facsimile of that experience.
In a word, it's amazing.
Basically, the three-hour "Walking With Dinosaurs" (Sunday at 8 and 11 p.m.) is a nature film about animals. Animals that happen to be prehistoric. Animals that are brought to life through the wonder of digital technology.
And it builds on our continuing fascination with dinosaurs.
"I think that they're real monsters," said Tim Haines, who produced "Walking" for the BBC (in cooperation with Discovery). "If you make a drama documentary and at the end you say, 'And it really happened,' everyone goes, 'Oh! That's a fantastic story!'
"And if you've shown this really bizarre animal that looks like something out of your nightmares, and then say, 'But it lived,' that's fascinating and stimulating."
Absolutely. "Walking With Dinosaurs" is riveting, both because of the way it looks and because of the scope of the project.
The three hourlong episodes (which air consecutively) play out like "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." As narrated by Avery Brooks ("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"), these are stories of ecosystems and the individuals that live in them.
Episode 1 includes the dawn of the Triassic Period 225 million years ago and the emergence of vicious predator coelophysis, the end of gentle plant-eater pacerias and the struggle of cynodonts, an evolutionary link between reptiles and mammals. It moves on to the life story of a diplodocus (some 150 million years ago), from the laying of the egg through her growth into a 20-ton behemoth, along with fellow dinosaurs like ornitholestes, stegosaurus, allosaurus and the 50-ton brachiosaurus.
Episode 2 goes under the sea 150 million years ago, following ichthyosaurs, such as the dolphin-like opthalmosaurus, the shark-like hybodus and the monstrous liopleruodon — 60 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons. Then, it's up in the air for flying dinosaurs like ornithocheirus and tapajara and back on land for the vicious predator Utahraptor.
(It's one of several Utah connections. That diplodocus in Episode 1 roamed through the state some 150 million years ago. And one of the on-air paleontologists adding perspective to the program is James Kirkland, Utah's state paleontologist.)
Episode 3 ranges from Australia 106 million years ago to Idaho 65 million years ago, from the polar forest where the likes of leaellynasaura and muttaburrasaurus adapt to the environment, to the life cycle of the Tyrannosaurus rex — up to the moment when a giant asteroid plunges into the Earth and causes the end of the dinosaurs.
(Like similar real-life nature documentaries, "Walking" includes violence, death and even dinosaur mating, albeit all done rather tastefully.)
Of course, basically all of "Walking With Dinosaurs" consists of educated guesses. The program producers and digital magicians worked with a wide array of paleontologists to create the program but are quick to admit it all comes down to best guesses.
"I think every single thing we presented, you'll find a scientist who will flatly disagree with it," Haines said. "Trying to get agreement amongst paleontologists is sort of like making a hole in water."
The show was criticized when it aired in Great Britain for not making it clear that much of what it presented was speculation; the Discovery Channel has added segments with paleontologists explaining the basis of the conjectures.
But the producers and consultants aren't making any apologies.
"There's always concerns when you restore a dinosaur about how much is speculation," said Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland who was one of those consultants. "Just remember that other than seeing a bone in the ground, anything beyond that has some degree of speculation. You go downtown to the county museum, and those fully restored skeletons have a certain amount of speculation in putting them together based on our knowledge of anatomy of closely related forms, how bones fit together and so forth."
A separate program, the hourlong "Making of Walking with Dinosaurs" (Monday at 10 p.m. and early Tuesday at 1 a.m.), explains more about both that process and the technology used to digitally re-create the creatures. And it's nearly as fascinating as the main documentary itself.
The digital animation in "Walking" was inspired by "Jurassic Park." (Indeed, Haines got the idea for the program after watching that 1993 film.) But the effects weren't done by the movie industry's leading special-effects maker, Industrial Light & Magic.
"At $10,000 a second, as quoted by ILM, I don't think we could have done it with them," Haines said. (The total budget for the three-hour "Walking With Dinosaurs" was about $10 million; ILM's $10,000 per second would have paid for less than 17 minutes.)
So the work was done by London-based FrameStore, where computer-animation director Mike Milne and his team of about 15 designers created more than three dozen dinosaurs — creatures that walked, ran, flew and swam — for less than $5 million.
"The technologies are very similar," Milne said. "Obviously, all of the animation community looks up to ILM as having started the whole ball rolling for us. And we stand on their shoulders, really."
The computer animation in "Walking" has taken some steps beyond "Jurassic Park" and its sequel. "I would say we got a bit further ahead on muscular movement and a bit further ahead on the detail of the textures," Milne said.
But the biggest difference is "the sheer quantity of animation." As opposed to a few dozen shots that totaled a few minutes in "Jurassic Park," "Walking With Dinosaurs" features more than 1,000 shots and nearly 2 1/2 hours of animation.
And the goal at FrameStore was to make the dinosaurs plausibly realistic.
"Our dinosaurs didn't have to act. . . . We're not really obsessed with whether the creatures eat lawyers or whatever," Milne said.
You can reach Scott D. Pierce by e-mail at pierce@desnews.com