7 reasons to watch Tom Hiddleston's new documentary series Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age features animals that have never been seen on screen before – marsupial lions (essentially carnivorous koalas), kangaroos so huge they can’t hop and dwarf elephants only three feet tall.

Narrated by Tom Hiddleston and executive produced by Hollywood film-maker Jon Favreau alongside creative director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit and long-term David Attenborough collaborator Mike Gunton, the Apple TV series was a (woolly) mammoth effort.

The production took three years, was filmed in 15 countries, and for the first time used technical reference puppets – Gunton was convinced after seeing the puppet of the baby stegodon. These could be filmed on location, thereby providing essential references for visual effects company Framestore to create the CGI (computer-generated imagery) animals.

Crucially, everything seen is backed by science – as well as gut feeling. “If you’ve spent your life watching animals, when you see one of these creatures brought to life on screen, there’s this final filter where it looks weirdly right… or rightly weird,” Gunton tells RT.

That’s what lead scientific consultant Dr Darren Naish, who has been the show’s palaeontologist since the first series in 2022, was in charge of. Here, he explains how he helped bring the unusual animals of the Ice Age to vivid life.

The man for the job

"I’m an expert on the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, which we featured in seasons one and two of Prehistoric Planet, but I’ve also published enough on Ice Age animals to be considered an expert for season three. I also provide detailed, specific information to the people at Framestore building the digital animal models."

Sketch to screen

"We consulted with more than 50 Ice Age specialists, using their expertise to compile asset packs on the animals, containing up to 30 pages of diagrams, drawings and information. I draw tons of stuff, and we work with various concept artists and paleo artists [who depict prehistoric life]."

Facts from the fossil

"Everything we do is grounded in science. How do we know how these animals moved and what they would have done? Well, we go to what we understand from the fossil record. We’ve got frozen bodies in permafrost. We can use fossil footprints to work out animals’ speed and gait. Since humans were Ice Age creatures, too, we drew these animals, so we can also look at rock art."

Scientific storylines

"Science establishes facts. But also, a woolly mammoth is a kind of elephant, so everything that’s true for African and Asian elephants, woolly mammoths would have done as well. Animals get themselves into all kinds of extraordinary situations. What happens if a woolly mammoth is trapped in a snowstorm and about to give birth? It must have happened, so it’s justifiable for us to come up with that storyline."

A lion that's not a lion

"Thylacoleo, the so-called marsupial lion, is a leopard-sized, predatory marsupial related to koalas and wombats, but fundamentally unlike anything alive today. It had a big opposable thumb with a giant claw, and fang-like teeth, but they weren’t canines, they were giant incisors. It had this ridiculously broad, muscled head. It took many, many iterations to make it feel like a real animal — it looked like a weird teddy bear at one point. There is Indigenous Australian rock art depicting it, so we’ve got some idea of what its pigmentation was like."

Prehistoric peeves

"Some animals in this series are not CG, they’re real animals, like the vole. We’re pretty confident people won’t be able to tell them apart. I have a massive list of pet peeves in CG animals. If you watch all the Jurassic World films, the dinosaurs roar and do this head wobble where their cheeks flutter as they’re blasting air out… nothing does that. Someone made that up in a film with a dragon or something, and it’s been copied. Some like to over-animate everything, but Framestore is the real deal."

Answering the unknown

"Some of the animals were an absolute challenge, and they might never have been reconstructed well before, because nobody’s understood them. We have to come up with answers to questions that people haven’t really considered. For example, the next time someone asks how an extinct snow sloth [Megalonyx jeffersonii] walks, we’ll be the only ones that have ever done it right. None of the work we do on the show, and that the VFX team does, ends up published in technical papers, but it should. It is actual science."

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