Dinosaurs rule the earth again. Or at least The 02 Arena.

For sheer spectacle, it’s hard to beat the giant animatronic lizards that stalk and stomp and roar through this stage adaptation of the hugely popular BBC show.

Soaring scale: the computerised creatures on stage

There’s a bit of natural history and geography thrown in too, plus some comedy to prevent enthralled kids becoming too scared. But it’s the fact of seeing a live show — including a beady-eyed, hungrily snorting tyrannosaurus rex — on such a scale that really thrills children and adults alike. As the dinosaurs themselves discovered, size sometimes matters.

Telling tales: Dominic Rickhards as narrator Huxley

It starts off small. We need the 02’s video screens to see our puny human narrator, the palaeontologist Huxley, and the tiny hatchlings he shows us to demonstrate the dinosaurs’ evolutionary solutions to a hostile Jurassic world.But then the carnivorous, 15ft liliensternus lopes on and snaps up one of the newborns. The creature’s snout and whipping tail are unnervingly realistic, even though you can see the legs of the human operator underneath.

Raptorous experience: Keeley Hawes takes her son Myles, left, and friends to the show as a ninth birthday treat

Bigger animals, the stegosaurus and allosaurus, are mounted on small mobile platforms, their legs rotating on an axle but their feet splaying and flexing when they hit the ground.

Gallery: Walking With Dinosaurs

Beyond this, the operation that makes them so uncannily lifelike is a mystery. Wrinkled haunches pouch and sway, lizard eyes blink. Two brachiosaurs crane on 50ft necks for the inflatable vegetation that sprouts around the stage. The creatures move with surprising flexibility, expressiveness, even grace. That said, by the interval (20 minutes of a 90-minute show covering 200 million years) I was worried we’d just be watching an impressive but ponderous parade of creatures, without any redness in tooth and claw. But then comes the elegant, winged lizard, flying against a back-projection of the newly volcanic earth, harried when it tries to land by a viciously synchronised group of raptors. Horned herbivores fight for herd supremacy to remind us it’s not only carnivores that can be brutal.

The US creators of this Australian-born show, William May and Scott Faris, are so confident of their big beasts they let themselves have fun with perspective. Tiny babies scamper after an enormous mother and the T-rex has a comically undergrown son. A fair amount of information, or at least theory, is also concealed in the visual bedazzlement. As Huxley, Dominic Rickhards acts like a time-travelling Blue Peter presenter, thrusting his arm into a pile of dinosaur poo and ducking to avoid hungry jaws.

There are flaws beyond the occasional reminder of the human mechanics. The 02’s video screens aren’t used enough: in one battle, a section of the audience saw nothing but a retreating dinosaur bottom. The script and score tread a fine line between the crowd-pleasingly effective and the cheesy.

Weirdest of all, and not the creators’ fault, there was flash photography and video going on all around the auditorium. Many Londoners apparently need to reduce this huge, live visual spectacle to a scratchy YouTube clip.

But it doesn’t detract from the visceral impact, and sheer technical brilliance, of a show that makes dinosaurs walk again.