over a hundred experts were consulted for every aspect of the series. Slowly, the production team focused in on animals about whom sufficient information was known to create larger narratives. As an example, Coelophysis was selected for New Blood (the first episode) because it was a typical early dinosaur which scientists knew a lot about. Since the series also aimed to showcase the environment and other animals around the "star" dinosaurs, Coelophysis also presented an opportunity since it had been found at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, one of the world's richest fossil beds. The behaviour of the animals depicted was primarily based on fossil evidence when possible (such as bite marks and fossil gut contents) and on behaviours in modern animals. Sometimes, behaviour was just reasoned guesses. For instance, the small pterosaur Anurognathus is shown in Time of the Titans (the second episode) to use the massive sauropod Diplodocus as a feeding platform to hunt insects. This was based on certain modern birds; there is no evidence of such behaviour in pterosaurs and it would be difficult to prove with fossil evidence. In the summer of 1997 and in the winter of 1998, Haines and fellow producer Jasper James took a small crew of eight people to travel around the world to places where ancient plant life reminiscent of plants during the Mesozoic still existed; locations that could be used as backdrops for the series. Of particular importance was an absence of grass, which at the time was believed to not have existed during the Mesozoic. Filming took several weeks and locations included the Labyrinth in Tasmania, the beech gap on South Island in New Zealand, the redwood forests of California, the araucaria forests in New Caledonia and southern Chile and the Bahamas. Shooting at a single location usually lasted for about four weeks. New Caledonia was particularly difficult to shoot in since the French Army were doing exercises there simultaneously and the film crew kept bumping into soldiers and tanks. Special effects Computer graphics Mike Milne and Framestore, consisting of fifteen designers, began working on animating the dinosaurs at the same time as Haines and James were shooting footage for the series. Production of several hours of high quality photoreal animation had never been done before, not even for feature films. The process of making the computer models began with creating clay maquettes, highly detailed small-scale physical models. Several