Where the Science Ends is Where the Artistry Can Begin

Dr Lindsay Zanno touring paleontologist with Walking With Dinosaurs The Arena Spectacular speaks to Sally Alrich-Smythe.

Walking With Dinosaurs The Arena Spectacular is a massive vision turned to reality by a huge team of many varied professions; engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists, painters, animatronic experts - you name it. The show started out here in Sydney in 2007 and has toured with great success internationally, developing all the while. This development is the key to the involvement in Dr Lindsay Zanno - whose profession as the Walking With Dinosaurs touring paleontologist makes absolute sense when you stop to think about it, but is one of those things an audience member would probably just not stop to think about! 

An absolute asset to the WWD team, Dr. Zanno is an overwhelmingly successful paleontologist, considered one of the world’s leading experts on anatomy, biology and the evolutionary relationships of therapod dinosaurs. She is the Director of the Palaeontology & Geology Research Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Zanno and her team have made a number of astounding breakthroughs, including the discovery of an entire dinosaur species; Siats meekerorum. Perhaps even more fascinating, Zanno was at the foreground of a relatively recent breakthrough that connected major dinosaur species to the birdlife of today, having discovered the likely feathering of these iconic creatures.

Lindsay took on her role with Walking With Dinosaurs a little over a year ago at the onset of the production’s North American tour. I was curious as to her actual involvement, knowing that the show is of course pre-scripted and designed, and had already been wowing audiences for a number of years before she came on board.

“I’m here to help the show highlight the new science because they sort of re-designed the image of the dinosaurs to fit the latest science to show that they have feathers.”The result is a much more colourful Tyrannosaurus Rex than what any of us will picture in our minds from popular representations in film, and even scientific images from the recent past; simply, “they’ve upgraded the predatory dinosaurs so that they look more akin to what the science is telling us.”

When I asked her about the level of creative license used in this show - the balance between what we know and what we have to ‘take stabs in the dark’at - Lindsay said, “where the science ends is where the artistry can begin”. In an incredible kind of irony however, it seems to me that the science has added to the show’s creativity. In what is essentially quite a bleak, dark and sparse arena space, it is these recent scientific findings that have hugely brightened the show. The seemingly subtle manipulation of, for instance, feathers running down the backs of the life-size dinosaur puppets adds a kind of character and zest to the creature’s stories

“As a scientist I’m not able to take any liberties with dinosaurs when I’m doing research…. It’s been really fun for me to be doing something that goes beyond the science and I guess have to make those calls about how to bring these dinosaurs to life”.

There are, of course, some things palaeontologists like Lindsay can’t contribute to the overall experience. She was, for instance, not directly involved in decisions regarding the colouring of the puppets’skin. That’s something that personally has always niggled at my mind; how do we know this dinosaur was green? Purple? Striped? We just don’t. This is something left up to the artists’discretion, though their work will have been inspired by likening the colours to the only living descendants of dinosaurs we can observe today: birdlife. Another example of the creative liberties practiced in the show is something that hadn’t occurred to me until Lindsay mentioned it, and that is sounds. When examining fossils, “evidence of sound lay in soft tissue that cannot be preserved”-  so, amazingly, the Walking With Dinosaurs team had no choice but to undertake some guesswork in this area, too.  It’s a lot of pressure on them, no doubt, but Dr. Zanno assures me she feels they’ve done an “amazing job”. In fact, when I asked her what her favourite dinosaur in the show was, her response relates wholly to the efforts of the creative team.

“My favourite of the dinosaurs in the show is called the Taurosauras, the horned dinosaur. This is interesting because as a researcher I’m not particularly fond of horned dinosaurs but when I saw that animal in the show I thought that it looked the most realistic to me, and it gave me a whole new perspective of the dinosaur. It had a real personality! It kind of reminded me of a rhino in Africa…or something which I just wouldn’t have thought of before!”

Exactly where did she think the personality lay in the puppet? In the way it moved in so life-like a way about the stadium, showing off every one of its intricately reconstructed muscles, she tells me. “But mostly,”she adds, “in the sound. The artists have absolute creative liberty with sound, and the decisions they made in this instance I guess really added something to the character.”

Personally not completely sold by the idea of big-scale, multi-dollar productions like this one, I praise this show - the indisputably incredible technical masterpiece that it is - almost completely for its educational value. When I attended the Sydney opening night, the arena was filled with young families, and the children who were coming to be blown away by the absolute mass of the dinosaur models. It’s great in itself that children in particular can see what dinosaurs might have looked like, but there has got to be a reason beyond that that somebody passionate for dinosaur-life as a field of study, like Dr. Lindsay Zanno, would choose to come on board WWD, a “spectacular” which essentially holds the chief purpose of entertaining. It’s the educational value, Lindsay tells me, that makes support for a show like this one so important. And it’s not just for the kids anymore.

“If you watch a bird, watch the way it moves, and look at the intelligence in its eyes and then you look at the dinosaurs…you start to see that connection really makes sense and you start to develop the very concept of dinosaurs in a different way entirely. ”Basically, people need to realise they were not the great, lumbering lizards we once believed they were. Still, why is it so important we, the general public and potential patrons to a show like this one, know what the dinosaurs actually were?

“I think we all know that you can’t understand where you’re going if you don’t understand where you’ve been. Palaeontology provides real-world data on how animals respond to climate-change, and how they’ve adapted to different eco-systems in time…I mean that is just so relevant today.”

Walking With Dinosaurs The Arena Spectacular is an absolute masterpiece of a show, and a collaborative vision that deserves a lot of praise from a theatrical viewpoint. Beyond this technical success, my talk with Dr. Lindsay Zanno has made me a true advocate for the show, as it teaches such an important lesson about the world in which we live. The show tells the “story of life,” Lindsay doted proudly, and, through accessible and entertaining means, “they’re really bringing it to life.”