The BBC is reviving one of its most ambitious factual brands with a tech-forward retooling of Walking with Dinosaurs, launching Sunday, May 25 on BBC One at 6:25 PM with a CG-heavy premiere that reframes the series through intimate, survival-driven narratives.
Episode 1, titled “The Orphan,” tracks a juvenile Triceratops in 66-million-year-old Laramidia—alone, outmatched, and on the run. The high-spec opener leans into the cinematic, as the young herbivore dodges predators and a towering pterosaur, before a climactic showdown with a Tyrannosaurus rex.
This is a franchise rethink built for the VFX era. Rather than offering broad prehistoric surveys, the new format zeroes in on individual creatures and story arcs, borrowing structure from scripted drama while grounding it in real paleontological research. The episode’s central storyline parallels ongoing digs in Montana, where fossil evidence continues to refine scientific understanding of the Triceratops’ life cycle and behaviour.
Powered by new animation pipelines and guided by up-to-date research, the series aims to thread documentary credibility with visual scale—similar to recent hybrid plays like Prehistoric Planet over on Apple TV+. Unlike earlier versions, this run is built as a bingeable digital-first title for BBC iPlayer and BBC One, positioning it squarely for family co-viewing and international export.
Future instalments will follow other prehistoric species across continents, each dramatised from a specific dino’s POV. But the premiere sets the tone: grounded science, high-stakes storytelling, and a sharp shift toward character-led natural history.
