What I’m about to say may sound masochistic, but there’s something wonderful about the experience of looking at a screen and not being able to recognize what’s there, especially when it’s a stunning animal that you should have seen before. My Ice Age nerd pride has been vanquished, but I think I’ve won: I’ve encountered a whole new representation of a real-life unicorn.
To be more precise, I’m referring to the “Siberian rhinoceros,” which less romantic scientists have baptized by that name ElasmotheriumWho lived 40 thousand years ago. Conventional reconstructions of the 5-ton monster have given a horn about 1.8 meters long. It would be easy to recognize him with such a spear stuck in his forehead. But the latest fossil data suggests that the horn on its forehead was little more than a hollow protuberance, making the monster difficult to identify.
The advantage of not choosing a more popular representation (unlike dinosaur toy manufacturers, who rarely have balls to cover with feathers…) goes entirely to the team behind “Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age”, a documentary series that has just become available on the streaming platform Apple TV.
It can be said that in the previous two seasons, the series’ producers were playing it easy, betting on the usual suspects in prehistoric animals (dinosaurs and their companions, of course). But the Pleistocene Ice Age, which lasted from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, has its own attractions.
“On the one hand, this is a relief from the challenge of trying to recreate dinosaurs,” Briton Mike Gunton, executive producer of the series and director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, told me. “We tend to forget that we were also Ice Age creatures: our ancestors saw these animals and even drew some of them,” he recalls. “The amount of evidence relating to them is enormous, some of them were mummified, and they are almost a contemporary species.”
Moreover, the five episodes of the season have a special appeal for the Brazilian viewer: we are talking about animals that everyone with CPF should know about. More recently – at least geologically speaking – Rio Grande do Sul’s Chapada Diamantina or what could one day become the center of Brasilia has been filled with armadillo relatives the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, sloths the size of an elephant and the largest sabertooth ever (Smilodon population) Trying to catch both.
The trio, of course, are among the stars of the series, with a wonderfully bold representation of a giant sloth, with no hair on its body, in a tropical forest, eating the 25cm-diameter (and 1kg-weighing!) round fruits of the apricot monkey, also known in English as the ‘cannonball tree’, for obvious reasons.
Some of the animals look like they came out of the “Star Wars” ecosystem. The best example is Brazilian Makrusheniawas once compared to a giant llama with a trunk, but in the series’ computer graphics, she gained a funny inflatable snout. Or the marsupial lion Thylacoleofrom Australia, a terrifying version of the carnivorous koala.
The series’ behind-the-scenes look at the end of each episode puts scientific context behind the influential scenes – including the possible role of… Homo sapiens At the end of this world of giants. The imagination capable of bringing them to life on screen must also be able to save the many flesh-and-blood giants who still exist.
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