animals) of the Cenozoic era, typically less represented in popular culture than dinosaurs. The budget of Walking with Beasts was £4.2 million, one of the most expensive documentaries ever made but much lower than a feature film with comparable visual effects needs. Tim Haines attributed the completion of the series despite this to solid planning. Research in preparation for Walking with Beasts was conducted full-time for nearly two years by the geologist Paul Chambers and the zoologist Alex Freeman. Like Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts was set to consist of six episodes which meant that six suitable settings had to be chosen for the programme. Chambers and Freeman picked the six settings of the programme based on the amount of good fossil evidence, position in the time line and number of interesting animals. The settings of some episodes had been picked already before any research was required, such as doing an episode on woolly mammoths and an episode on indricotheres. For much of the process, Chambers and Freeman were considering more than six settings, which meant that some potential episode ideas were forced to be abandoned. Among the abandoned ideas were an episode set in Australia, based on fossils from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. After the selection had been narrowed down to six settings, selecting which animals would appear in each episode was a straightforward process. After Chambers and Freeman had decided upon suitable settings for the programme, the filming locations for Walking with Beasts were chosen by the assistant producer Annie Bates over a nine-month period. Bates first spoke with palaeobotanists to figure out suitable locations that were sufficiently similar to the intended ancient landscapes. After determining a comprehensive enough selection of possible filming locations, Bates traveled to the different sites with a video camera to shoot test footage, which was then viewed by the producers to get an idea of the terrain. Filming locations for Walking with Beasts included Florida, Mexico, Java, Arizona, Brazil, South Africa and Yukon. In order to write the storylines for the series, producers Jasper James and Nigel Paterson watched numerous nature documentaries on modern animals. They wanted to avoid episodes simply becoming "lists of animals and how they lived" and instead wanted them to draw viewers in and make them want to know what would happen to the animals next. Chambers and Freeman also worked on the storylines, with the goal