BBC Walking With Dinosaurs returns with fight to the death after 25 years off screen

A fight to the death between a T-Rex and a Triceratops is one of the highlights The new series, which will introduce viewers to a wealth of new information that has come to light in the intervening years.

And the fight showcases how the adult bull Triceratops - the only dinosaur that wouldn’t have run from a Tyrannosaurus - had the power to create eye-like patterns on its frill, to intimidate opponents.

has a lead character, brought to life using cutting edge CGI by specialist artists - with every single detail relating to genuine finds made by palaeontologists.

READ MORE:

READ MORE:

The first episode stars a baby Triceratops, with viewers being shown the painstaking real-life process of the three-year old female’s bones being dug out, with the experts nicknaming her Clover.

Clover is then brought to life using story-telling to show how she might have lived and some of the scrapes she might have got into - including her own interactions with a T Rex and also an 11-metre long Spinosaurus, one of the rarest dinosaurs to have been excavated. The audience will see that while she might be the size of a large dog, Clover is more like a cat when it comes to having nine lives.

factual boss Jack Bootle said: “We may not have Hollywood budgets but we do have science on our side.”

Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim said these were the most accurate dinosaurs to have been created on screen so far. ”In many ways we kind of live in a golden age of dinosaur discoveries right now,” he explained. “We're finding more dinosaurs than ever before, but I think, most importantly, we're shedding light on aspects of dinosaur biology we never thought we'd be able to shed light onto.

“We can peer inside the brains of dinosaurs, we can try and figure out how good the vision of the T-Rex was. We can bounce lasers off the surface of dinosaur eggs to reconstruct their colour and we have soft tissue preservation; feathers, internal organs in some cases. So it's a really exciting time to be a paleontologist. We can do amazing things.”

He said it had been important to link the science and the storytelling together. “I think the CGI creatures are fantastic of course, but the fossils are also objects of incredible beauty. They have so many incredible stories to tell from the dig sites. Going out there and digging these creatures up, it’s like the ultimate adventure.”

And he added: “These are the moments where we know that we are kind of rewriting the dinosaur paleontology textbooks. I was like, ‘I want to make sure I get this 100% right. It needs to be perfect’.”

Clover’s actual death in episode one remains a mystery, which means she could perhaps have succumbed to disease or got stuck in quicksand because the experts know she wasn’t predated by an aggressive dinosaur, or crushed by a bigger one.

Later in the series there will be more exploration on screen of how some of the lead characters are killed. Executive producer Andrew Cohen said: “We do have some of the most extraordinary sequences where we see how some of the dinosaurs came to their end, very much from the evidence that has been pulled out of the ground.”

The show has been three years in the making. Executive producer Andrew Cohen said: “We've talked for a very long time about when the right moment for bringing this back was, and I think we've always been looking for just a sweet spot, a moment where the science journalism can sort of come together and there's so much to say about dinosaurs that has transformed in the last 25 years.”

Showrunner Kirsty Wilson admitted that making the series came with a huge amount of responsibility because so many kids - and their parents - were dinosaur mad. “I mean it's pretty intimidating - because you sort of feel you have people's childhood in your hands a little bit.

“We've got to push the boundaries - the dig sites are featured and the original series didn't do that. So when people go, ‘Well, how the hell do they know that?’ we don't need to answer that question. Viewers can literally see the science themselves.”

Six digs are featured, chosen following discussions with more than 200 paleontologist, in locations including Morocco, Portugal and North America.

She said she wants viewers to be filled with awe but also to enjoy the drama. “We wanted the very best from the dinosaur field, but we also wanted a really great dramatic storyline. I think it's fair to say I’m probably the fluffy one of the bunch - I wanted people to feel about these animals like I did. I wanted to fall in love with them. So having a great story emerging from the science was really key.”

Paleo artist Jay Balamurugan said that both science and artistic skill are required to fully bring the creatures to life. “I think dinosaurs especially are the ultimate sort of gateway science,” she said. “You just look at them and you want to know more.”

She said that designing the dinosaurs was a fairly intensive process. “Each of these animals took months and months to create. We dug into every paper, every academic publication and spoke to every paleontologist who had worked on the material. You really come up with a quite memorable but also scientifically solid set of characters.

“I get asked whether or not we are adding emotional expressions to these animals, but every single detail, every muscle movement, is underpinned by science. If they look cute, that is because they probably did look cute in real life.”

Nizar said he was particularly excited about the giant spinosaurus, about which relatively little was known until recently. “It is a dinosaur like no other,” he said. “It’s got this giant sail, a crocodile snout, the paddle tail. It's a water-loving dinosaur. It's an animal that is doing things that no other dinosaur is doing.

“There's only one Spinosaurus skull in the existence in the , and so every new bone we uncover is a big surprise.”

He believes that despite advances in genetic cloning there is no chance at present of a dinosaur ever being brought back to life. “If I could resurrect the dinosaur, I would definitely have a pet one and pull it in here on the leash,” he laughed. “But I think the answer is almost certainly no. We may be able to bring back some creatures from the not so distant past maybe, something like a mammoth or a woolly rhino, but with dinosaurs, the genetic material is just a not there in the state we need it to be.”

Walking with Dinosaurs, , Sunday 25 May

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on , , , , , and .