Tuesday, November 2, 1999 Published at 09:39 GMT
Facts and fossils
Did cynodont pairs bond for life?
First, they conquered the world. Then, with Jurassic Park, the cinema. Now, it is the turn of the television documentary. A ground-breaking, new television series about dinosaurs, made by the BBC, is currently thrilling 150 million people in 19 different countries.
The programmes use cutting-edge computer animation and animatronics to show how the creatures might have looked when they walked the Earth at least 65 million years ago.
The quality of many of the fossil specimens in world museums means we have a very good idea of how some of these creatures looked, but we actually have precious little information about how they behaved - no-one knows, for example, how male-female pairs would have conducted courtship and mating.
"The dinosaurs only exist as fossils," says series producer Tim Haines. "We know a great deal about them but we don't actually know enough to have them running around as we do in our programmes. We have to use informed speculation to fill in the gaps."
But the critics argue that Walking With Dinosaurs should have made a bigger effort to tell the audience where the facts finished and the speculation started.
"When you fill in the gaps you come down to individual judgements and they have shown things I wouldn't necessarily agree with," says Dr Paul Upchurch, a palaeontologist at Cambridge University.
Dr Graham Farmelo from London's Science Museum concedes that it would have been tedious to qualify every statement with "we think that" or "we suspect that".
"On the other hand," he says, "there are very important distinctions to be made between things we are practically certain of and things which might possibly be true - and I think the series doesn't address these issues nearly seriously enough."
Black and white
The media as a whole is often accused of trivialising scientific debate by portraying complex issues in simplistic black and white terms. The pace of scientific development can sometimes seem bewildering and the facts can all too easily be lost in the requirement for instant opinions.
This makes it all the harder for society to take the important decisions about the application of new science, warns Dr Farmelo.
Science has thrown up an array of media stars in the last few years. These are men and women whose books regularly hit the top of the best seller lists and have a knack for making even the most difficult concepts seem accessible.
It is what science should be about, says one of the very best of them, Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London.
"It's often forgotten, for example, that when Darwin wrote the Origin of Species in 1859 he wrote it as a popular science book - it wasn't a technical book for biologists.
"The popularisation of any kind of knowledge is a very good thing and science in particular because it impinges so much on people's lives. Popularisation, in a narrow sense, is part of science because the whole point of doing science is to tell other people all about it."