Britt Allcroft, a British producer, director and writer who adapted the antics of a cheerful, impetuous locomotive into a TV series, “Thomas & Friends,” that became a sprawling franchise and a longtime favorite of children and adults, died on Dec. 25 in Los Angeles. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Holly Wright.

Ms. Allcroft was the driving force behind bringing Thomas the Tank Engine, an animated locomotive first conceived in a series of children’s books in the 1940s by Rev. Wilbert Awdry, to television screens. The series spawned a movie, merchandise and even theme parks, ballooning into a billion-dollar franchise.

Her original adaptation was a live-action production with a small budget that premiered in 1984 on the British channel ITV as “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends,” later shortened to “Thomas & Friends.” Audiences were quickly drawn to the show’s life lessons packaged with catchy music, lush landscapes and an entertaining ensemble cast of humanlike locomotives. It became a runaway success that aired for more than three decades.

“Children live these days in a fast-paced world, but I don’t think children really change,” Ms. Allcroft said in a 1995 BBC documentary. “They need in their lives gentleness, comfort. They need fun, and they need stories that, whilst being entertaining for them, also help them interpret the world.”

Ms. Allcroft first encountered the series while researching a documentary on railroads. Earlier attempts to adapt the books to TV had faltered, but she pushed for the rights, envisioning a series with a narrator who hewed closely to the original books.

Her conviction led her to finance much of it herself, even mortgaging her house, she said in an 1995 interview with Australia’s “60 Minutes.”

As for the narrator, Ms. Allcroft had been searching for the right voice when she heard it on television: “I walked into the room and Ringo Starr was being interviewed on a chat show,” she said.

The former member of the Beatles became the first in a long line of stars to narrate the franchise, among them Michael Angelis, George Carlin, Alec Baldwin and Pierce Brosnan.

“This was a woman pioneering the TV industry in the early 80s, and it was mostly male dominated,” said Brannon Carty, the director of “An Unlikely Fandom,” a 2023 documentary on the series’ enduring appeal. “She had all these things going against her which would make the average person give up,” he said. “Despite all that, she took the lead.”

The series found its way to American children in 1989, when Ms. Allcroft brought it to PBS in the form of a spinoff series, “Shining Time Station,” that included clips from the British version of the show.

“She was a very good businesswoman,” said Rick Siggelkow, a television producer who collaborated with Ms. Allcroft. “She had a vision, and she had this intuitive understanding of children. She would just forge ahead.”

There was skepticism from some executives at first that the show would be a success, Mr. Siggelkow said, but Ms. Allcroft believed that children would be drawn to a slower-paced tale that had the intimacy of a bedtime story.

“There was a gentleness to Thomas that was really very different from everything else that was on the air,” he said in an interview.

“Shining Time Station” became a hit with American children, winning PBS some 1.2 million viewers — rivaling that of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” according to an article in The New York Times in 1991. The series was also aired internationally, seeding a global commercial demand for merchandise, from toys and train sets to posters and puzzles.

“Thomas & Friends” is now one of the world’s largest toy and television franchises for preschoolers, with analysts estimating annual global retail sales of more than $1 billion in 2016. Mattel bought Hit Entertainment, the British owner of Thomas, in 2012 as part of a $680 million deal.

After some criticism that the show’s characters lacked diversity, recent adaptations of the Thomas world, both onscreen and in merchandise, have added locomotives from Brazil, China, India and Mexico.

The franchise made it to the big screen with the 2000 film “Thomas and the Magic Railroad,” and a separate, animated version of the series, “Thomas and Friends: All Engines Go,” which aired on the Cartoon Network in 2021. A second film is in the works, according to Mattel.

Britt Allcroft was born Dec. 14, 1943, in West Sussex, England before moving to London.

When she was 16, she developed an interest in local theater and the work that went on behind-the-scenes. Ms. Allcroft joined the B.B.C. when she was 19, presenting on shows that included “Blue Peter,” on which she later moved to the production team.

In the early 1970s, she transitioned to Southern Television and later formed her own production company, Britt Allcroft Productions, under which she created television and stage shows while also working at local television stations.

At the end of the decade, she was hired to make a short documentary on British steam trains, and recalled the books from her youth.

She was married to Angus Wright, a television producer who worked closely with her on developing “Thomas & Friends” for the screen. They divorced in 1997.

In addition to her daughter, her survivors include a son and grandchildren.

The show’s longevity, enduring through generations, has made it a nostalgic favorite for adults, as well. In recent years, online communities have cropped up to celebrate the show and even create their own model versions of beloved episodes.

When Ms. Allcroft attended a screening of the 2023 documentary, “people were cheering and screaming” for her, said Mr. Carty, the director. “It was like the Super Bowl in there when she walked out.”

Ultimately, Ms. Allcroft said in the documentary, she wanted her world to be an escape.

“I wanted to make it so that any little child watching could feel that that’s where they could go,” she said. “That they weren’t alone, and they were comforted and that they were inspired.”

Emmett Lindner contributed reporting.

He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.

Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull’s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions. In a fusillade of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.

After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government on Friday snapped back, though in characteristically polite fashion.

“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, said in an interview with LBC radio. Mr. Gwynne’s boss, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, told reporters, “Some of the criticisms Elon Musk has made, I think, are misjudged and certainly misinformed.”

Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the American election last fall. In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country’s politics before elections next month, Mr. Musk has nurtured close ties to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

In Britain, Mr. Musk’s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online. Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Mr. Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.

Britain, he said, “is turning into a police state.”

Since then, however, Mr. Musk has waded into other volatile issues, from declaring his support for the anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., to stirring up anger over the government’s response to a decade-old child sexual abuse scandal in the northern town of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by “grooming gangs” composed largely of British Pakistani men.

Perhaps most provocatively, Mr. Musk has taken up the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He has been in prison since October after being convicted of defying a court order by repeating false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee who had successfully sued him for libel.

Mr. Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.

“Free Tommy Robinson!” Mr. Musk posted on Jan. 2 as his pinned item atop his X account, which has 210 million followers.

Mr. Musk’s championing of Mr. Robinson has put his other right-wing allies in Britain in an awkward spot. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K. and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, has long shunned Mr. Robinson, who founded the English Defence League, an Islamophobic, nationalist group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s.

Mr. Farage, who has reveled in Mr. Musk’s endorsement and has courted him in the hopes of winning a donation to Reform U.K., echoed his demands for a new investigation of the child sex abuse scandal. But he has been conspicuously silent about Mr. Robinson.

As in Germany, where Mr. Musk’s promotion of the far-right AfD party provoked a widespread backlash against him, Mr. Musk’s interventions have won him few fans in Britain. But analysts say his proximity to, and influence over, Mr. Trump mean that his opinions, amplified by his social media platform, cannot be ignored by the government.

“His message doesn’t work in Britain and Germany, and yet the governments are constrained by their relationships with Trump,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research organization in London. “It will be hard enough to have a relationship with Trump. What Musk does is put this nongovernment official in the center of the court.”

Mr. Katwala argued that it made sense for the government to respond to Mr. Musk’s more extreme or erroneous statements, if only because his unpopularity makes him an inviting target for other critics. “They leave an open goal by not saying anything,” he said.

Privately, British officials say they hope that after Mr. Trump’s inauguration later this month, Mr. Musk will be too busy overhauling the American federal government to continue his daily barrage of criticism of Britain and Germany. But in the meantime, his online reach is broad enough that “it affects the political weather,” Mr. Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as a case in point.

Mr. Musk’s posts have helped whip up a tempest over a case that was the subject of local and national inquiries dating back to 2014. After one of Mr. Starmer’s ministers, Jess Phillips, pushed back on calls for yet another national investigation — saying it was a matter for the local council — the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, followed Mr. Farage in castigating the government. “No one in authority has joined the dots,” she posted on X on Jan. 2.

On Friday, Mr. Musk claimed that Ms. Phillips, the under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls who has long campaigned for women’s rights, was a “rape genocide apologist” — language that women’s rights supporters said jeopardized Ms. Phillips’ safety. He has also tried to turn the scandal against Mr. Starmer, who ran the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the abuses first came to light.

Although several men were imprisoned, the inquiries found that the police and prosecutors were slow to react to the allegations, in part because the victims were reluctant to come forward and in part because of worries about racism, given that most of the accused were British Pakistanis.

“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Mr. Musk said in a post that was pinned to the top of his account earlier on Friday. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

In fact, in 2013, in the wake of the scandal, Mr. Starmer published new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children.

Having won a landslide Parliamentary majority in July, Mr. Starmer is in no immediate danger of losing his job. But the drumbeat of disinformation and criticism from Mr. Musk, combined with the prospect of him giving money to Reform U.K., has rattled people across the political spectrum in Britain. Lawmakers have called on the government to tighten laws to restrict foreigners from donating to British political parties.

Mr. Musk’s endorsement of posts calling on Charles to step in and call an election betrayed his ignorance of how Britain works. Under the terms of its constitutional monarchy, the king can dissolve Parliament, but only at the request of the prime minister, who decides when to call an election.

“He’s a 21st-century Citizen Kane,” Mr. Katwala said of Mr. Musk. “He’s got a picture of Britain, a picture of Germany, and he looks for information that confirms those pictures. The problem he has in exporting it to Britain or Germany is the evident lack of knowledge of Britain or Germany.”

Quarry workers in England have discovered the clawed footprints of a 30-foot-tall predator and the sunken tracks of other dinosaurs, in what paleontologists are calling one of the most significant finds in Britain in nearly three decades.

A trail of five distinct prints were uncovered last summer in a quarry in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles northwest of London, scientists announced to the public this week. The prints belong to both herbivores and carnivores that roamed the area during the Middle Jurassic period, around 166 million years ago.

Rather than the grasslands that blanket the area today, Jurassic Oxfordshire more resembled the Florida Keys, humid with lagoons and muddy swamps — prime territory for dinosaur feet to sink into the ground.

The area, first excavated in 1997, had already become known among paleontologists as the “dinosaur highway.” Scientists have found more than 40 sets of footprints across nearly 200 yards of pathways. The new tracks expand it into one of the largest sites of dinosaur discoveries in the world, said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist and collections manager at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

“These recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found,” Ms. Nicholls said.

At first, the quarry workers did not think much of the abnormality they found while clearing clay in late 2023. The first trace of a dinosaur was just a hump in the ground, said Mark Stanway, who manages the quarry.

“It was probably not as dramatic as it sounds,” he said.

The pattern of humps, each about 10 feet apart, turned out to be the last vestiges of giants who died tens of millions of years ago.

Paleontologists from the University of Birmingham and Oxford first visited the site in November 2023, finding clawed, three-toed footprints in a shape that has become associated with dinosaurs in popular culture.

“It’s like a caricature of a dinosaur,” Dr. Nicholls said.

Those tracks were made by a megalosaurus, a ferocious predator that stood roughly 30 feet tall, weighed one and a half tons and walked on its hind legs. Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically named and described at Oxford, in 1824.

“We were excavating new trackways of megalosaurus in 2024, which of course is the 200th anniversary,” Dr. Nicholls said. “Completely coincidental but really spine-tingling.”

The other four prints belonged to one species, likely a herbivorous sauropod, a family of dinosaurs known for their long necks and tails, small heads and thick pillars for legs — features that made them the largest land animals ever.

The footprints were more than three feet long and one and a half feet deep, about the size of a baby’s bathtub, said Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham.

The researchers said they could not tell precisely what species of sauropod made the print but that they believed it was a cetiosaurus, a dinosaur some 60 feet long and weighing roughly two tons, because of previous fossil finds in the area.

The tracks also give scientists some insight into how the animals behaved, particularly at the point where the different species’ paths interact, the scientists said.

For much of the path, the sauropods seem to be walking at a steady space heading north. But then, suddenly, one of the animal’s left feet lands too close to the previous one, suggesting that it stopped and possibly looked over its shoulder.

Though the scientists cannot determine exactly when the prints were made, the prints hint at a moment of interaction.

“It’s very possible that the cetiosaurus is actually stopping to look back at the megalosaurus,” Dr. Nicholls said.

The sets of sauropod footprints are also different sizes, showing that the animals might have moved in a herd with juveniles or traveled alongside smaller herbivores. The megalosaurus, the apex predator at the time, moved alone.

“A body fossil is the death of the animal,” Dr. Edgar said, “whereas we’re getting a kind of snapshot of what these multiple animals were doing in life.”

In addition to its swampy features, Jurassic Oxfordshire was also affected by higher sea levels.

Inside the prints, scientists found evidence of marine life, namely brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves and echinoids, shelled invertebrates that resemble mollusks and sea urchins today, said Dr. Nicholls.

In the nearly 30 years since tracks were first discovered in the area, technology has rapidly progressed, allowing scientists to more successfully record their findings.

During the seven days last summer when the teams of scientists worked on site, they took hundreds of pictures, created molds, recorded drone footage of the site and created three-dimensional models, allowing ongoing study of prints that may now be lost to the elements.

Work at the quarry went on unaffected, Mr. Stanway said, adding that he would not be surprised to find even more tracks in the coming years.

Syria’s new leaders met the French and German foreign ministers in the capital, Damascus, on Friday in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month.

Annalena Baerbock of Germany and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus for the first such trip in years on behalf on the European Union, as world powers have begun building ties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that leads the new Syrian government.

Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Barrot met with Ahmad al-Shara, the group’s leader, after visiting the notorious Sednaya prison, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime had tortured and killed thousands of detainees.

“We are traveling to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Ms. Baerbock said in a statement before the meeting. “A new beginning can only happen if all Syrians, no matter their ethnicity and religion, are given a place in the political process.”

The visits are among a flurry of contacts between rebel leaders and Western officials looking to gradually open channels to the new Syrian authorities. Mr. al-Shara has worked to project a moderate image since taking power.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is still blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations because of its past ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. al-Shara has called on the international community to remove that designation and sought to reassure minority groups, saying he wants to focus on rebuilding Syria after years of civil war.

“The current events demand the lifting of all sanctions on Syria,” he said in a televised interview last month.

Mr. Barrot said that France was urging the new rulers in Damascus to pursue a political transition that would allow “all the communities in Syria, in all their diversity, to be represented.” Part of that included reaching a “political solution” with the Kurdish minority, he said, which has carved out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria.

The diplomacy comes during a realignment across the Middle East, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime was a core part of Iran’s regional coalition. His family’s decades of iron-fisted rule were opposed by many Syrians, spurring the 2011 uprising and civil war. At least six foreign militaries were involved in the fighting, including those from Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Many countries — including the United States — have begun forging ties with the new government. In late December, Barbara Leaf, the senior State Department official for the Middle East, met with Mr. al-Shara in Damascus and told him that Washington would no longer pursue an outstanding bounty for his arrest.

Some Syrians — particularly Christians and other minority groups — are uncertain about Mr. al-Shara, pointing to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s conservative Islamist roots. In Idlib, a province controlled by the group since 2017, its leaders banned buying and selling alcohol and opened a chain of free religious schools. But Mr. al-Shara’s faction has eschewed the draconian decrees and brutal punishments of extremists like the Taliban and the Islamic State.

In a sign of the jitters among some Syrians, a posting on a Facebook page run by the Education Ministry this week described a new curriculum that was interpreted by some as taking a more Islamist slant.

It was not clear whether any of the changes had been implemented, but the minister of education, Nadhir Al-Qadri, said in a statement that the curriculum was unchanged except for the removal of “content glorifying the Assad regime” and the addition of images of the Syrian revolutionary flag.

Officials in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have laid out an ambitious plan for establishing a new government, and rebel leaders have assumed key positions to oversee a transition. They say they are establishing a caretaker government in consultation with Syrians of all backgrounds, as well as a committee to draft a new Syrian constitution.

Many in the region are also wary of the new Syrian government, including Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates, which has long tried to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam, as well as Israel.

Overnight on Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed Syrian defense research sites near Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Israel declined to comment on the report.

Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian military sites since the fall of Mr. al-Assad in an effort to eliminate sophisticated arms like chemical weapons and long-range missiles. Mr. al-Shara has said he will uphold a longstanding cease-fire agreement with Israel, saying that Syria poses no threat to its neighbors.

Here are other developments in the region:

• Houthi missile attacks: The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen launched a ballistic missile at Israel before dawn on Friday, setting off air-raid sirens across central Israel, including in Jerusalem. The Israeli military said it had intercepted the missile and there were no reports of serious casualties. Israeli fighter jets have flown over 1,000 miles to strike Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen but Israel has struggled to stop the attacks, which have escalated over the past month.

• Northern Gaza hospital: The Israeli military is operating near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, from which many doctors and patients have already fled, health officials there said, noting that the sound of gunfire could be heard outside. The Israeli military said it did not intend to evacuate the hospital. The Israeli military raided Kamal Adwan, another northern Gaza hospital, last week, charging that Hamas was operating in the compound. Israeli troops apprehended at least 240 people they said were militants, including Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital director; Amnesty International has called for his release.

• Israeli strikes in Lebanon: The Israeli military said on Thursday night that it had bombed Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, while a 60-day truce largely continues to hold. Since the agreement went into effect in late November, Israel has repeatedly bombarded what it says are Hezbollah fighters violating the agreement. Hezbollah has generally refrained from responding militarily. The current cease-fire is set to expire in late January, although the United States and its allies hope it becomes permanent.

Abu Bakr Bashir and Aurelien Breedencontributed reporting.