Dr Witton's depiction of a giant pterosaur known as an Azhdarchid
A University of Portsmouth palaeontologist was a special advisor on the BBC’s latest hit series, Planet Dinosaur.
The series tells the stories of the biggest, deadliest and weirdest creatures ever to walk the Earth, using the latest fossil evidence and computer graphics. Dr Mark Witton, a Research Associate in the School of Earth and Environmental Science (SEES), supplied information on the appearance, habits and movement of the flying prehistoric creatures known as Pterosaurs and advised the production team on possible scenarios in which they might appear.
Dr Witton, who is also a renowned paleo-artist, also supplied some of his own drawings and images to help the design team produce images as close as possible to what scientists believe the creatures looked like. At the time the series was in production, Dr Witton and colleagues from SEES were building life-size model pterosaurs for the Royal Society’s summer science exhibition in London. Sketches and designs for the models also formed part of the package of information supplied to the show, which is about to broadcast the third of six episodes.
Dr Witton said: “I’ve been very impressed with the series so far as the producers seem as keen on presenting scientific information as entertaining their audience. The producers have clearly taken on board the information and advice from palaeontologists to produce a programme which reflects what we know about these creatures without resorting to fantasy.
“Most animations and scenarios are based on genuine fossil data, such as direct evidence of what certain animals were eating or biomechanical studies of feather shape which tell us which dinosaurs could glide or fly. You can trace virtually every component of each episode back to one study or another which is very refreshing for this sort of programming. The producers were clearly keen to make their show as informative and accurate as it could be based on our current understanding of these animals.”
Dr Witton’s expert advice is likely to be seen most clearly in episode six on 19th October, when one ‘star’ of the show is Hatzegopteryx, a pterosaur with a wingspan of about 10 metres which would have been about as tall as a giraffe.
“With a 2.5 metre long skull longer than that of even the biggest meat-eating dinosaur, it could easily have swallow animals the size of human beings,” Dr Witton said. “But we only have a tiny amount of its skeleton so most of the reconstruction in the programme is extrapolated from other closely-related animals.”
Hatzegopteryx is a type of azhdarchid pterosaur from Romania. It lived about 70 -65 million years ago at the end of the Mesozoic Era, or the ‘golden age’ of the dinosaurs portrayed in the series which airs on BBC 1 on Wednesdays at 8:30pm.
