March 16, 1956

Dr. Michael Dixon, (March 16, 1956), director of the Natural History Museum, spoke about the mission of such institutions. 'Technology can bring the magic of museums to all' was his summary of the significance of the museum's collaboration with a recent David Attenborough film: "Natural History Museum Alive 3D", ...[wherein] Attenborough meets characters from the Natural History Museum usually only known by their skeleton or fossilised remains. The dodo and the diplodocus, the sabre tooth cat and the ichthyosaur — each comes alive through scientifically accurate 3D.
...
'The visual effects specialists at Colossus productions worked very closely with our scientists to devise a plausible recreation of each animal. For the scientists, it was an interesting and surprisingly difficult task. Accustomed to working with them as fossils, it was an intellectual leap to imagine them in detail as living and breathing creatures. Responding to the questions from the 3D production team meant working out how these animals might have moved, sounded and behaved to a level they had not necessarily considered before.
....
'For scientific collections, increased access brings international democratisation, expanding the workshop of scientific research from the corridors of South Kensington to the labs and offices of researchers on every continent.

'The world’s great museums are already actively working to digitise their collections. The Smithsonian Institution recently announced an impressive multi-million dollar commitment to it. And the French government has funded the Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle to digitise its herbarium. Such comprehensive approaches promise that many thousands of physical loans can be replaced with an instant flow of shared information. Digitisation also opens up scientific information to a technologically literate, smartphone-wielding public, offering the potential for crowd-sourced science. This democratisation of science can really increase the rate at which we fully understand the world.[stet]'

My own guess is that the biggest CGI job in these nature films is Attenborough himself. But now let's find out more about Michael Dixon  who has been director of the Natural History Museum since 2004.
Michael Dixon studied at the Imperial College, London and graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of York in 1984. He married twice: first, from 1988 to 1999, to Richenda Milton-Thompson. Then he and Deborah Mary Reece married in 2001.

He worked as the Publishing Director for John Wiley & Sons Ltd, from 1983–96.
Other relevant posts include his tenure as Director General of the  Zoological Society of London, from 2000–04. And until recently he was a Trustee of the International Trust for Zoolological Nomenclature, (2004–14.)

Michael Dixon was knighted in 2014.