Although Dino Hunters ended its second season on a positive note, it still does not seem like the show will return for a third season in 2024.
Discovery’s docuseries, Dino Hunters, combines this ever-present fascination with tales of the prehistoric, with the modern notion of good old 21st century capitalism.
Dino Hunters follows the modern-day ranchers who use the valuable fossils that they track down in order to make a living.
Has Dino Hunters been renewed for a third season?
Discovery green lit Dino Hunters in 2020 and after a very successful first season, the network agreed fairly quickly to bring everyone’s favorite dinosaur hunters: Clayton Phipps, Luke Phipps, Michael Harris and Jake Harris, back for a second season. Dino Hunters’ second season aired from July to September of 2021.
However, while Dino Hunters fans are still hoping that Discovery will bring back this show for yet another season – it seems as though the critics may have won this round. It has now been almost three years with no news on a possible Dino Hunters renewal.
And while it is never out of the question for a show like Dino Hunters to make an unexpected and out-of-the-blue comeback, it seems pretty safe to say that this show will likely not be returning for a third season in 2024.
Dino Hunters: From then until now
As it stands, Dino Hunters aired a total of 14 episodes throughout its two seasons.
But, while you might not be able to watch new episodes of Dino Hunters anytime soon, the show’s first two seasons are still available on a range of online platforms (including Amazon Prime video, Discovery+, Apple TV, Vudu, fuboTV and more).
These first two seasons can be summarized as follows:
| Season | Episode |
| Season 1 | 1. “Dinosaur Cowboys” |
| 2. “Million-Dollar Dino” | |
| 3. “Curse of the Carnivore” | |
| 4. “Shots Fired” | |
| 5. “We Got Skull” | |
| 6. “The Verdict Is In: Nano Or T-Rex” | |
| Season 2 | 1. “Doubling Down on Dinos” |
| 2. “Duckbill Buffet” | |
| 3. “Mammoth Mass Mortality” | |
| 4. “This Thing is a Monster” | |
| 5. “Monster Ceratopsian” | |
| 6. “Skull Shock” | |
| 7. “The Race is On” | |
| 8. “Rex Revealed” |
Examining Dino Hunters’ ratings
Whenever a show is cancelled unexpectedly, the show’s ratings- and viewership numbers are usually the best place to go to get some answers.
However, Dino Hunters’s case, this only led to even more confusion, as the show’s ratings and viewership remained fairly high throughout its first two seasons.
When Dino Hunters first premiered on June 19, 2020, the show brought in a very impressive 1,117 million viewers (with a 0.20 rating in the 18 to 49 demographic).
And though this viewership did drop slightly by the end of Dino Hunters’ second season, when the show brought in about 579,000 viewers (with a 0.08 rating in the 18 to 49 demographic), it was still ranking among the top 80 Original Cable Telecasts on television at the time (according to ShowBuzzDaily)
Why would Dino Hunters be cancelled?
The fact that Dino Hunters was still performing relatively well at the end of its second season has only raised more questions about why the show was cancelled.
However, there may be a few non-viewership-related factors which can shed some light on why this show was not renewed.
For a start, Dino Hunters’ third season would have likely coincided with the first few months of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger and the show’s renewal could have easily fallen through the cracks.
However, we suspect that the criticism of the show’s various inaccuracies may have had more to do with this decision than any behind-the-scenes bureaucracy.
It turns out that though Dino Hunters is beloved among many fans, certain individuals and groups take issue with the show.
This includes the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which went as far as to publish an open letter asking Discovery to reconsider airing the show in 2020 and creating this Change.org petition, which was started in 2021.
How the show lives on outside of television
In the end, it does not seem like Dino Hunters is going to be returning to our screens in 2024, or even in the future. However, this does not mean that the show has ceased to have an impact on fans and the wider paleontological community.
Avid fans may remember that the team found what was rumored to be evidence of a “Nano T-Rex” at the end of its first season.
And based on what Clayton has shared on his Facebook page recently, it seems as though discoveries like the “Nano T-Rex” are helping scientists to fill in the missing links in their understanding of how these species interacted and lived millions of years ago.
