Walking With Dinosaurs-style series imagining life for extinct animals around extinction events
Year: 2026
Certificate: pg
An eight-part, Walking With Dinosaurs-style documentary that imagines the fortunes of now-extinct animals through extinction events. The opening episode takes us back 252 million years to when our planet had just one supercontinent – Pangaea – and was 11 degrees Celsius hotter than it is now. Some of the creatures around in that episode feel so awe-inspiringly different to what Earth has now that it’s almost like watching alien life enduring its own very personal version of The Last Of Us. The sight of the gorgonopsians – apex predators for the time – struggling to find shade as the temperature soared is surprisingly poignant.
Things get a bit more familiar later on – and less interesting as result – with mammoths and dire wolves featuring in the episode When America Flooded, which does deploy some impressive CGI to imagine what it must have looked like when the ice sheets melted and tore across the continent. The quality of the re-creations feels like it varies across the episodes but, when this show works, it really sets the imagination racing.
It’s produced by Tim Haines, who co-created the old ITV tea-time dinosaur romp Primeval. (Eight episodes)
