Apple’s ‘Prehistoric Planet’ presents nature as it was epochs ago

It may be titled “Prehistoric Planet” but the makers of the new Apple TV+ documentary series would prefer you think of it as “Planet Earth” if it was filmed 66 million years ago.

That’s because the five-night event series that streams Monday through Friday, May 23-27, combines state-of-the-art photography of environments around the world and CGI animation with the latest knowledge in the field of paleontology to create a modern-day nature documentary. Except instead of wildebeests, polar bears and alligators, the beasts on display are numerous species of dinosaur, including several previously unknown ones.

So in the five David Attenborough-narrated episodes, viewers will be introduced to the likes of the Qianzhousaurus, a slender, feathered tyrannosaur dubbed “Pinocchio rex” because of its long snout; and the Nanuqsaurus, a small tyrannosaur that’s also feathered and best suited to life in the extreme cold of prehistoric Alaska.

It’s the brainchild of Mike Gunton (“Planet Earth II”), who executive produced the series with Jon Favreau and BBC Studios Natural History Unit.

“One of the aims of this series,” he explains, “is to try and show people that at this time in the Earth’s history, it was incredibly rich with life, diversity all over the planet. You know, lots of these dinosaur shows just show deserts and things like that but actually they lived everywhere. They lived in the poles, they lived in the tropics, they lived in deserts, they live in mountains, they lived under water.

“So we’ve gone around the world to try and find the most accurate avatars, effectively, of those ancient environments that exist today. And there are some. If you look carefully, there are places that are very good stand-ins for the environments that lived then.”

Another objective of the series is the accurate depiction of the dinosaurs. The goal here, says Gunton, was to make the Cgi-animated creatures look as real as possible while also depicting their behavior accurately according to the latest science.