D
avid Attenborough is explain-
ing why everything you
thought you knew about
dinosaurs is wrong. Starting
with the Tyrannosaurus rex.
The T. rex roaring like
thunder charging after a terrified Jeff
Goldblum in a Jeep is the defining
image of Jurassic Park and most other
dinosaur movies. Except these portray-
als are almost entirely wrong, as Prehis-
toric Planet, a new show on Apple TV+,
narrated by Attenborough, reveals.
The T. rex was actually quiet when it
hunted — and it could count to ten, to
check that all its eggs were in the nest.
“On this programme we show
extraordinary creatures you may never
have heard of,” the presenter says. At
96 he is thrilled to go back to what
made him fall in love with the natural
world, cycling around Leicester on fos-
sil hunts as a boy (it’s a family interest,
his brother Richard was in Jurassic
Park). “There’s quetzalcoatlus, a flying
reptile the size of a giraffe that soared
across the sky, and masiakasaurus,
who had to keep their babies safe from
giant devil toads.”
Attenborough is the world’s most
famous naturalist — so many Chinese
viewers downloaded Blue Planet II that
it temporarily slowed the country’s
internet — and his passion means Pre-
historic Planet showcases the latest
research. We learn that the T. rex only
made noise when it was mating. “It
made a deep booming noise with its
jaws closed,” says the palaeozoologist
Dr Darren Naish, the show’s technical
adviser. He published 17 papers during
filming and says we are living in a
“golden age of dinosaur discoveries”
with a new species identified every
week and new fossils being found
with tissue and feathers pre-
served intact.
Prehistoric Planet is
released in five episodes
over five days, with each
focusing on one ecosystem
in the Cretaceous Earth
— forests, deserts, ice
worlds, freshwater
and coasts. The
world as it was 65
million years ago is1, 2, 3 — ROAR! MEET
THE COUNTING T REX
brought to life by the Iron Man director
Jon Favreau, using smart CGI. We learn
about the secernosaurus, a duck-billed
herbivore from South America that
could navigate rivers using the stars.
The nanuqsaurus, a warm-blooded
tyrannosaur, lived in the polar north
protected by a thick coat of feathers.
And the turkey-size velociraptors
hunted in packs, using feathers to keep
stable while climbing cliffs.
Drama comes with the dinosaurs
who fought. The sauropods diplodocus
and brontosaurus, and the dread-
noughtus, for instance, may have
weighed as much as 50 tonnes, but
new research suggests they were sur-
prisingly agile and could stand on their
hind legs to fight, using thumblike
claws to rip into a mating rival’s neck.
Attenborough was thrilled by how
technology brought this world to life.
“When I was growing up, holding a
fossil in my hands was the closest you
could get to a real dinosaur,” he says.
“A desire to exploit the latest innova-
tion has been the defining stimulus of
almost every major television series I
have ever made. The most recent were
drones, low-light cameras, the ability
to speed up plants and slow down ants.
Imagine being able to send natural his-
tory film-makers back in time to create
a real-life natural history of our planet
in the late-Cretaceous period.”
While there’s no direct environmen-
tal message in the way that Blue Planet
dealt with ocean plastic, Attenborough
hopes that seeing the past will help us
to value the future. “Anything that
transports people into an environment
which is unfamiliar, but which is an
important natural one, is valuable,” he
says. “I was in a television studio when
the Apollo mission launched. I remem-
ber very well a blue sphere in the
blackness, and in that one shot there
was the whole of humanity. I real-
ised our home is not limitless. I hope
as a consequence that the needs
and wonder and impor-
tance of the natural
world are seen.” cStephen ArmstrongPrehistoric Planet
is on Apple TV+
every night this
week, from
tomorrowwe can overreach with science. For
Neill, Jurassic Park was about the GM
crop boom, while Jurassic World Domin-
ion comments on the climate crisis.
“Jurassic films have always been a
metaphor for the dangers of uncon-
trolled, shall we say, business interests?”
Neill says with raised eyebrows. “And
I’m not in any way antiscience, but one
has to be judicious and careful, and
Jurassic has always had that theme bub-
bling under it.”
Passion for these movies remains,
even if the sequels never recaptured the
wonder of seeing the dinosaurs for the
first time. A Spielberg sequel, The Lost
World, was bloated, and while Jurassic
Park III was better, it ended rather
abruptly, as if the money ran out. (“I’m
not sure we ever wrote the ending
properly,” admits Neill, who was in that
sequel.) The 2015 reboot entertainingly
David Attenborough says that dinosaurs were
cleverer than we give them credit for, as he goes
back to his childhood obsession in a new showJurassic films have always
been a metaphor for the
dangers of big business
| TELEVISION
imagined the park as a zoo and now the
franchise finally ends.
Jurassic World Dominion is a huge
film. “I have never seen action like
this,” Neill gasps, but this is not entirely
positive. In the first film the T. rex does
not turn up for 45 minutes. That builds
story and character; the threat of some-
thing that we have not yet seen. You
lose that with relentless action.
“But an audience 30 years later
wouldn’t find that pace acceptable,”
Neill says with a sigh. “As a result this
has action from the moment the lights
go down. Though of course it has quiet
moments.” “It’s very romantic,” Dern
interrupts teasingly. “So romantic, my
darling,” Neill says. I wonder if I should
leave the Zoom.
I ask which lines fans quote to them
most. “Life found a way,” Neill says. Dr
Grant says that when he sees baby dino-
saur footprints. It’s better than what
Dern is remembered for: “Dinosaur
droppings.” Dr Sattler finds an ill tricer-
atops and delves into its gigantic pile of
poo. We laugh at a viral video of a man’s
gate that, when opened, sounds like the
theme tune. The film is such a phenom-
enon it inspires nonsense like that.
“Wherever I go, people might not know
my name,” Neill says. “But they know
I’m the guy from Jurassic Park.” cJurassic World Dominion opens on Jun 10Natural wonder
Sir David
AttenboroughFantastic beasts Laura Dern as Dr
Ellie Sattler and Sam Neill as Dr Alan
Grant in the original Jurassic Park film.
Left: the two actors today
UNIVERSAL PICTURES AND AMBLIN ENTERTAINMENTJOHN PHILLIPS /GETTY IMAGES22 May 2022 7