Dino fest full of monster thrills

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS LIVE, Manchester Arena

IT has to be one of the fastest-moving thrill rides of them all: what else covers 200million years in 95 minutes?

Walking With Dinosaurs Live is the £10million Australian arena spectacle based on the BBC’s magnificent CGI dinosaur-fest of 10 years ago.

And what an amazing feat of animatronic technology it is, seen by three million people around the world since 2007.

A narrator guides us through prehistory from the Triassic period 250million years ago, to the Jurassic period, then forward to around 65million years ago, when the dinos died out.

He introduces amazing facts within a world created by ferns, mountains, projections, trees and flowers that are themselves brilliant bits of air-driven design.

But most of all the narrator introduces the creatures, and they are quite a sight.

Taking three key periods of the dinosaur age, he brings us the 28ft veggie Plateosaur from the Triassic age protecting its young from a thieving 16ft Liliensternus predator; a Jurassic Allosaurus doing its best to attack a club-tailed Ankylosaur and Torosaur, the latter after it had fought another Torosaur for control of its territory.

He offers us a Stegosaurus, a 55ft Brachiosaurus and its even-bigger, 70ft long mother and intelligent, pack-hunting raptors.

Finally he brings us a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex and its mother, the latter magnificent at almost 40ft long, with massive head and jaws and a roar its operators proceeded to show off at every opportunity.

This is one of those evenings that takes very little effort to suspend disbelief.

The detail in the beasts is staggering: their power fully realised, their movements astonishingly realistic thanks to teams remotely operating necks, eyes, jaws and tails, and drivers literally piloting the larger ones from built-in carts.

Best of all, there is no Disneyesque anthropomorphism: the creatures aren’t given names, they don’t behave like people, and their behaviours are as close to the real thing as a show like this can get them — but entertaining too.

Dinosaurs rule the earth again until Sunday.