Kelly Marcel initially wrote the Terra Nova treatment purely as an exercise to write something her father would like, while working at a video rental shop in Battersea, London.

After pitching the idea in Los Angeles, Marcel was offered $300,000 per episode for a 13-episode season but turned it down, partly because producer Steven Spielberg's suggestion to add dinosaurs made her uncertain about the project; she ultimately just sold the idea and returned to London.

Australia was chosen as the filming location after Steven Spielberg vetoed Hawaii, since he wanted a different setting from his 1993 film Jurassic Park.

The two-hour pilot was shot over 26 days in late 2010 in south-east Queensland, Australia (Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and Bonogin in the Gold Coast Hinterland), but torrential rain forced additional reshoots in 2011, pushing the total cost to about $14 million.

More than 250 sets were built for the production, and each episode took eight to nine days to shoot but required six weeks of post-production, twice the average for television at the time.

Fox took the unusual step of ordering a full 13-episode season without first ordering just a pilot, partly because the large, expensive Australian sets would have been costly to dismantle and rebuild.

Since only about 10% of Cretaceous-era dinosaurs are known from the fossil record, the producers invented plausible fictional species for the show, and paleontologist Jack Horner was brought in to design creatures distinct from those in the Jurassic Park franchise.

Many of the weapons used by the cast in the series were actually reworked and repainted Nerf blasters.

Mido Hamada's character Guzman was originally intended to be the colony's second-in-command with a much bigger role, which is why he was credited as part of the main cast, but he was written out after the pilot and the second-in-command role went instead to Lt. Washington.

Stephen Lang was cast as Commander Taylor shortly after playing a similar authoritative military character in the 2009 film Avatar, in which he also starred alongside a comparable premise of humans on an alien-like frontier.

The article notes a parallel between Terra Nova and Avatar, released two years earlier with a similar premise and also starring Stephen Lang.

The Terra Nova pilot premiered at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con before its television debut, and the Fox premiere drew 9.22 million viewers, rising to a 4.1 rating in Live+3 results, the best performance by a new drama at the time.

Despite strong early reviews praising its visuals and ambition, mid-season critical reception turned sharply negative, with reviewers comparing it unfavorably to other sci-fi shows, before critical opinion improved again by the finale.

The show won the Visual Effects Society award for 'Best Visual Effects in a Television Series' in 2011 and was also nominated for 'Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial.'