Dinosaur (TV series)

Lore & Background

The series was commissioned in 2022 by the BBC and produced by Two Brothers Pictures in association with All3Media. In May 2023, American streaming service Hulu co-commissioned the series. Filming began in Scotland in August 2023, with Glasgow locations used throughout August and September 2023. The Natural History Museum of Glasgow, based on and filmed at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, serves as Nina's workplace.

Series 1 follows Nina, an autistic paleontologist who enjoys her routine life until her sister Evie suddenly announces she is engaged to a stranger. A second series was commissioned in November 2024, with filming underway in June 2025.

Ashley Storrie, making her television acting debut in the series, has said playing the role of Nina, an unmasked autistic person, was a liberating experience that helped her with her own autism diagnosis. The cast also includes Danny Ashok as Ranesh, Lorn Macdonald as Lee, David Carlyle as Bo, Sally Howitt as Diane, and Greg Hemphill as Ade.

Reader's Guide

Dinosaur received critical acclaim for its portrayal of an autistic lead character. Jack Seale in The Guardian gave the first series four stars, writing that the show is 'powered by the lead character’s autism, but it’s not defined by it' and gives people with the condition 'a long overdue voice'. In 2024, the series was nominated for four BAFTA Scotland awards, with Curtis and Storrie winning the award for best writers. This award success led to the recommission for a second series.

Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian gave the second series four stars, calling it 'refreshing, groundbreaking' and noting that it 'absolutely piles up the gags'. The series is notable for being Storrie's television acting debut and for its authentic representation of an unmasked autistic character. Its production by Two Brothers Pictures and co-commission by Hulu and the BBC helped bring the Glasgow-set story to international audiences.

Did You Know?

• Dinosaur is Ashley Storrie's television acting debut.
• The Natural History Museum of Glasgow in the series is based on and filmed at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
• The series was nominated for three BAFTA Scotland awards in 2024, with Curtis and Storrie winning best writers.

Creative Vision and Production Team

The 2025 revival of Walking with Dinosaurs was formally unveiled on 4 June 2024 as a multinational co-production uniting BBC Studios' Science Unit, PBS, Germany's ZDF, and France Télévisions. Notably, no crew members from the landmark 1999 original returned for this new iteration. Bertie Carvel was cast as narrator, while Andrew Cohen and Helen Thomas served as executive producers. Kirsty Wilson took the helm as showrunner, and the directing and producing duties were split among Stephen Cooter, Tom Hewitson, and Owen Gower. A defining creative decision emerged from consulting paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, who revealed the series was partly conceived around the goal of centering a documentary episode on Spinosaurus. The production team leaned heavily on expert input, consulting more than two hundred paleontologists throughout development. To extend the experience beyond the screen, a companion volume authored by Cohen, Thomas, and Wilson was published by DK in June 2025, the same month the series hit UK airwaves.

Episode Structure and Dinosaur Protagonists

Rather than surveying entire eras or ecosystems, the six-episode miniseries adopts an intimate, character-driven approach: each installment follows a single individual dinosaur encountered at an active excavation site. The narrative weaves together real paleontological fieldwork—showing researchers at work in the dirt—with computer-generated reconstructions of the animal placed within live-action environments. The initial announcement highlighted Spinosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, and Lusotitan as key subjects, but promotional imagery unveiled on 22 January 2025 broadened the roster to include Pachyrhinosaurus and Albertosaurus. A full trailer dropped on 10 April 2025 gave audiences a first sustained look at the visual style. This structure meant that the human element of discovery—brushing sediment, measuring bone fragments, debating interpretations—was not merely supplementary but integral to how each dinosaur's story was pieced together on screen.

Global Broadcast and International Adaptations

The series rolled out across multiple territories over the summer of 2025. In the United Kingdom, BBC One premiered the first episode on 25 May, with the remaining installments made available simultaneously on BBC iPlayer. Stateside, PBS structured its broadcast as a three-day event kicking off on 16 June. Australian viewers could catch the series on ABC TV and its streaming platform ABC iview, while Chinese audiences accessed it through iQIYI. Japan received a distinctive treatment: a 70-minute special titled "Walking with Dinosaurs: Prologue," produced jointly by the BBC and NHK, aired on 8 August 2025. This program featured pop star Masaki Aiba of Arashi as a navigator, alongside Yuna Furukawa, National Museum of Nature and Science researcher Manabe Makoto, and NHK announcer Tomomi Hirose. The full six-episode series followed in Japan starting 10 August, with the Ueno museum serving as the studio backdrop for the Prologue.

Critical Reception and Scientific Debate

Critics broadly agreed the 2025 series represented a visual step forward from the 1999 original, though many felt the CGI still trailed behind the photorealistic standard set by Prehistoric Planet. Opinions on the storytelling split along a clear line: reviewers who found the anthropomorphized dinosaur narratives distracting clashed with those who embraced the character-driven format. Jack Seale of The Guardian called the paleontologist segments "painstaking to the point of tedium," while Carol Midgley of The Times and Dan Einav of the Financial Times both singled out the on-site dig sequences as highlights. British paleontologist James Ronan offered a more nuanced scientific assessment, commending the series' accuracy and fieldwork integration but faulting certain behavioral exaggerations and a narrower range of dinosaur behavior compared to the 1999 version. He characterized the overall effect as a "dramatized re-enactment of possible scenarios" rather than genuine naturalistic observation, and flagged minor inconsistencies in the animation.