Prehistoric Planet’s dinosaurs are different
I first heard about Prehistoric Planet, Apple TV+’s CGI dinosaur show, I thought it sounded like a ridiculous gimmick. A nature documentary about animals that have been dead for 65 million years? Produced by the director of the pointless and vaguely nauseating “live action” remake of The Lion King? Narrated by David Attenborough, in an offensively obvious pander to fans of Planet Earth? No, thank you.
Then, for reasons I can’t recall or explain, I watched the first season, and I loved it. All the groan-worthy things about the idea remain true, but they just work in the fully realized show. The CGI looks amazing and never fake or uncanny. The narration is welcoming and engaging. The vignettes have all that Planet Earth magic, and they don’t feel forced even though they’re fictional. And the dinosaurs! Not to be completely cliche about it, but I’d never seen dinosaurs1 like this before.
It’s not just that the dinosaurs on Prehistoric Planet have traits like feathers and colorful skin, which remain hard to picture for those of us who imprinted on Jurassic Park. The attention to detail on the show is obviously staggering, but I have no knowledge or opinions about its scientific accuracy, or the decades-long debates that must be swirling behind every choice the creative and scientific teams make. (Not to mention the future discoveries that will almost certainly prove some of their choices wrong. Science, baby!) What feels special about the dinosaurs on Prehistoric Planet isn’t that they’re necessarily more accurate than their predecessors. It’s that they feel alive.
So much of how we imagine dinosaurs is related to their death. If you’re not a paleontologist—and maybe even if you are—the most interesting thing about dinosaurs is that they went extinct. That immutable fact hovers over the rest of their existence like a cloud of doom that makes it hard to see anything else. When their bones are posed in museums, they’re usually alone, and always immobile. The remains of individuals are presented as, first and foremost, representatives of their ill-fated species, not singular, self-possessed beings. If we’re encouraged to imagine dinosaurs in action at all, it’s usually during a hunt, an attack, or a fight to the death. Dinosaurs killed, and they died, and then they all died, and that was that.
Prehistoric Planet strips away the doom to show dinosaurs as what they actually were: Animals. It extrapolates from present-day animal and especially bird behavior—some of which echoes scenes from Planet Earth—to imagine not how dinosaurs died, but how they spent their lives. It’s familiar knowledge that birds recognize each other, care for their babies, put on wild mating displays, communicate, cooperate, and play. But it had never, ever, ever occurred to me to wonder if dinosaurs recognized each other, or imagine what kinds of relationships they had beyond predator-prey. There’s plenty of hunting and dying on the show—maybe even more than in Planet Earth, since, you know, they’re not real. But there’s so much else besides. I had never pictured a dinosaur nuzzling its baby, or doing a mating dance, or protecting a herd member, or enjoying a mud bath. It had never even occurred to me that one could imagine those things.
The beauty of Prehistoric Planet, for me, isn’t that dinosaurs definitely engaged in those behaviors, or that they did them exactly how the show depicts. The scientists who worked on the show explain a lot of their research and reasoning in the (fascinating, unmissable) extra content, but I know enough about translating science into stories to understand there will always be gaps that can be filled only by very educated guesses. What’s most compelling to me is how hard they try to avoid projecting the end of the story back onto everything that happened before. They let dinosaurs exist on their own terms, free from any sense of inevitability or failure, and in doing so access a truth much deeper than what any specific animal looked like or did: That the past was just as complex, contingent, and arbitrary as the present, and by viewing it through a lens of destiny, you miss all the best parts.
And pterosaurs, mosasaurs, etc.