'Walking With Dinosaurs' Makes Visit To CBS Detroit, Staff Fascinated, Terrified

By Christy Strawser

"It's a man in a costume, it's a man in a costume, it's a man in a costume ..." No matter how many times you repeat it, it's still a viscerally scary experience when a giant creature with yellow eyes makes eye contact -- and roars.

Those teeth are something to see. We cherry picked the best moments and set them up here in this animated gif gallery.

Take our word for it, the dinosaurs from the show "Walking with Dinosaurs" are realistic. The baby T-Rex character made an appearance at the CBS Radio offices to show staff at WWJ, WOMC, WYCD, 98.7 AMP and 97.1 The Ticket what it's made of.

Everyone had to check it out.
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See it for yourself with "Walking With Dinosaurs" hits The Palace of Auburn Hills Aug. 6-10, 2014.

Tickets at $59.50, $49.50, $39.50, $19.50 can be had on Palacenet.com, The Palace Ticket Store and all Ticketmaster locations. Tickets may be also charged by phone to American Express, Discover, Visa and MasterCard by calling 800-745-3000.

The show promises to "depict the dinosaurs' evolution with almost cinematic realism."

Promoters add: "The show has scenes of the interactions between dinosaurs, how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators."

Worldwide, more than eight million people have seen this show in 243 cities and over 2,000 performances, promoters say.

"Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous period. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 36 feet tall, and 56 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the production," according to a press release.

"Many of the technologies we are using on Walking With Dinosaurs The Arena Spectacular are borrowed from film, said Sonny Tilders, who created the creatures. "The computer software and hardware we have developed is based on the systems used to control animatronic creatures in feature films."

Suited puppeteers, who are inside the creatures, operate five of the smaller dinosaurs, including the one that visited our office Thursday.

"We take the audience on a journey back in time and show them how the dinosaurs might have actually looked in their prime - huge, sometimes frightening, sometimes comical monsters - that fought for survival every day of their lives," said Director Scott Faris. "Our dinosaurs move exactly like they are real -- with all the roars, snorts and excitement that go with it. The realism is mind-blowing!"

We agree.