The origins of a Disney feature about dinosaurs date back to 1988, when the Studio's live-action film division acquired a screenplay entitled "Dinosaur" by Walon Green ("The Wild Bunch") as a potential feature. At that time, director Paul Verhoeven and stop-motion wizard Phil Tippett were interested in making the film. In late 1994, Walt Disney Feature Animation adopted the project and spent several years developing the material as well as a series of tests to determine the best way to approach the film. For the first test, the filmmakers selected several representative shots and used scale model miniatures as the backgrounds for their computer-generated characters. A second test, using live-action plates as the backdrops for the CG action, proved to be the most effective and became the blueprint for what was to follow.
While the filmmakers and technical experts embarked on the tests, the story team continued to flesh out the plot and a team of visual development experts worked on the character designs and look of the film. Thom Enriquez, director of story, led the story development team with director Ralph Zondag doing much of the storyboarding himself. David Krentz, a self-proclaimed "Dino-geek," served as one of the film's key character designers and visual development artists. Inspiration for the final designs came from many members of the creative team as well as from renowned freelance artists like Mark Hallett (who provided detailed musculature drawings), Doug Henderson (who helped visualize the look of the Cretaceous world), Ian Gooding, and Ricardo Delgado. Directors Zondag and Leighton also played a major creative role in determining what the characters would ultimately look like.
Although many liberties were taken in portraying some of the characters, the directors and animators did a considerable amount of research and met with some of the top experts in their field. Jack Homer, a noted paleontologist from the Museum of the Rockies, visited the Studio on several occasions and lectured to the "Dinosaur" team. Leighton also spent time at Homer's Museum in Bozeman, Montana where he laid out the actual bones of a 100-million-year-old Tenontosaurus (an animal similar in form to an Iguanodon) to get a sense of how the bones and muscles were connected and how that structure would affect its movements.
Dinosaur expert Don Lessem, a respected author and museum consultant/designer, also provided valuable information to the creative team. Stuart Sumida, a top paleontologist/biologist from Cal State San Bernardino, lectured the artists and animators on dinosaur locomotion and anatomy. The directors and several of the supervising animators also visited a local - animal reserve to ride elephants and study their massive structures as reference for how a prehistoric creature might move.
Leighton recalls, "In the original script, the main character was a Styrachosaur, a big hefty bow-legged animal that looks like a rhino. It had a big crown with lots of spikes coming out. It also had a relatively small face with a beak, which would have made it very difficult for dialogue purposes. Getting the emotion and acting range we needed would have also been hard. The Iguanodon had two advantages for us. Most importantly, it was the most horse-like and gave us something we could attach emotions to a little easier. The eyes were close to the mouth so we could really get a whole range of expression. We also liked the fact that it was combination biped/quadroped so from an animation standpoint it was a lot more interesting as to what we could do with it. Based on our research at the Museum of the Rockies, we learned that Iguanodons had a grasping digit which could also wrap around and almost touch the palm."
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