“Witness the rise – and the fall – of nature’s greatest empire.”

Welcome to The Dinosaurs — an epic journey into a lost world.

From executive producer Steven Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment, and the award?winning team behind Our Planet, this groundbreaking documentary series follows the rise and fall of the dinosaurs across hundreds of millions of years. George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic does the honors again, just as they did with all those years ago with the original Jurassic Park, though obviously, this is intended as a documentary, not a suspense drama.

Sci-fi and fantasy fans have had a fascination with dinosaurs going all the way back to the first depiction of them in Windsor McCay’s first animated comedy Gertie the Dinosaur, released in 1914. We’ve been in love with them ever since.

It was Steven Spielberg who pioneered the use of CGI to represent dinosaurs in cinema with the first Jurrassic Park motion picture in 1993. Animation software called SoftImage (pronounced Soft-EE-mazh) was used by Industrial Light and Magic to create the animated creatures.

It was the software’s early adoption of inverse kinematics that helped seal the deal for Spielberg. Forward kinematics is where an animator sets the angle of each joint by hand to create the character’s poses. Inverse kinematics is where the animator moves the extremities of the creature—the head, hands, shoulders, hips, ankles and feet—to where they need to be for a given frame, and the computer follows mathematical rules to figure out how the skeleton would have to pose and bend to make those placements possible. In other words, to make a character take a step, one simply moves the foot to a new place, and the rest of the leg follows the foot. Using the old method, each joint would have to be set by hand.

Silverback Films and Amblin Entertainment are behind the project. Nick Shoolingin-Jordan serves as series director, with Dan Tapster, Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill as showrunners.

Narrated by Academy Award–winner Morgan Freeman. Watch The Dinosaurs, a documentary series consisting of four one-hour episodes – only on Netflix, March 6.