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When the original “Walking with Dino­saurs” debuted in 1999, Emily Bamforth was a teenager already intrigued by Mesozoic creatures. Her favorite film remains the original “Jurassic Park” (the sequels, reboot and the reboot’s sequels, not so much).

“It was the first time anyone brought dinosaurs to life in a way that portrayed them as animals as opposed to monsters,” Bamforth said in a recent Zoom interview. “It was an influential series as a young person, and to be part of it as an adult is a childhood dream.”

Bamforth, now curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada, is featured in the fifth episode, “Enemies Assemble,” of this new iteration of “Walking with Dinosaurs.” In the U.S., the show jumps from its original 1999 cable home on Discovery Channel to PBS, airing 8-10 p.m. June 16-18 on Pittsburgh’s WQED-TV.

Unlike the original series, which was just computer-­generated stories of dinosaurs, this new six-episode season, narrated by Bertie Carvel, includes documentary elements that follow real-­life paleontologists as they go about their work. Their discoveries inform the dinosaurs’ stories, rendered using modern CGI.

“Twenty-five years later, we wanted to really evolve the storytelling,” said Andrew Cohen, head of the BBC Science Unit, which produced “Walking with Dinosaurs” with PBS. “We felt that, at the heart of any show about dinosaurs, the question that always forms with the audience is, how do we know? The way this series works, we’re inside the heads of paleontologists. When we look at Emily and others working on site, the visual effect is perhaps what they are imagining as they’re digging these bones up.”

Cohen said the goal is for every VFX sequence to be as rooted in science as possible.

“Obviously, we knew in our discussion the history of the sites we were going to, so we could start to begin to know the story we perhaps were going to be able to tell,” Cohen said. “Only when we spent time on location and seeing the discoveries come out of the ground could we fully form the whole narrative of each of the episodes.”

In Episode 1, “The Orphan,” “Walking with Dinosaurs” follows a baby triceratops, Clover, who gets stalked by a Tyrannosaurus rex.

“This is about engaging audiences with stories that feel compelling but that are based on the very best science,” Cohen said. “The story of Clover is particularly interesting because of the fact that those bones were intact. We pretty much know that she wasn’t predated, and that forms a factual basis upon which we then begin to lay out the rest of the story.

“Like anyone who’s ever made a dinosaur show, we are taking creative license with how we tell the story. But I think what makes this series particularly interesting and actually unique is that we are using a specific dig, a specific animal and tying the story that we’re telling as closely as possible to the evidence that is available.”

Episode 2, “The River Dragon” (9 p.m. June 16), explores the life of a spinosaurus who struggles to lead his young family through a deadly environment. The episode features an appearance by Nizar Ibrahim, a vertebrate paleontologist and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, who in 2016 became a research associate with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

“Spinosaurus is the most enigmatic and exciting dinosaur in the world right now, and we just have one skeleton of this spectacular, sail-backed, crocodile-snouted and largely aquatic predator, hailing from an underexplored corner of the world: the Sahara,” Ibrahim said in a statement provided by PBS. “Most people are somewhat familiar with the dinosaurs we all grew up with, but in this spectacular Saharan adventure, they are going to come face to face with a very different giant — longer than T. rex — and a reminder that there is a lot we don’t actually know about dinosaurs. These creatures were a lot more diverse and adaptable than we previously gave them credit for.”

In paleontologist Bamforth’s episode, the focus is on a herd of pachyrhinosaurus who embark on a 400-mile migration across a hostile wilderness where the greatest threat to their survival is a cataclysmic storm.

“It is a brilliant story for this bone bed, possibly one of the largest bone beds in North America,” Bamforth said of the episode shot in Alberta, Canada. “The excavation at the site has actually been ongoing for 30 or 40 years or so.

“There has always been this big question: What killed them? How did these things get here, and why are they in such huge numbers? The episode really takes all of the theories and the ideas and crystallizes it into a narrative that I think is very appealing to audiences, very dramatic.”

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