News stories written at the time of the show's premiere highlighted Dinosaurs' connection to Jim Henson, who died the year before. Henson conceived the show in 1988, according to a New York Times article, adding he wanted it to be a sitcom, but about a family of dinosaurs. Until the success of The Simpsons, according to Alex Rockwell, a vice president of the Henson organization, "people thought it was a crazy idea."

In the late 1980s, Henson worked with William Stout, a fantasy artist, illustrator and designer, on a feature film starring animatronic dinosaurs with the working title of The Natural History Project; a 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project (presumably the Dinosaurs concept) until the "last months of his life."

The television division of the Walt Disney Company began working on the series in 1990 for CBS before the series landed on ABC, which Disney eventually acquired