The Ice Age tends to get flattened into a postcard: endless white, a few mammoths, maybe a saber-toothed cat. Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, debuting on Apple TV+ on November 26, replaces that simple picture with something far more dynamic. It’s a world defined by climate whiplash, mass migrations, strange megafauna, and ecosystems scrambling to adapt.
The new season marks a major shift for the franchise—away from the distant age of dinosaurs and into the Pleistocene, a time when the Earth was swinging between extremes and our own ancestors shared the landscape with giant sloths, dire wolves, marsupial lions, and hulking ground armadillos.
Dalton Duong, my resident nature enthusiast and lay expert in paleontology, joined me recently for an interview with executive producer Mike Gunton to discuss the new season of Prehistoric Planet. Gunton told us the team chose this era because it was one of the most volatile windows in Earth history. “This great turmoil was going on… nature was having to respond in remarkable ways,” he explained.
Even without trying to make a statement about today’s climate problems, it’s hard not to see the parallels. The Ice Age moved in thousand-year swings; we’re experiencing changes within decades. That tension gives the series a quiet relevance without ever turning into a lecture.
A Different Kind of Monster Movie
The Pleistocene is full of animals we think we know—mammoths, cave lions, giant deer—but Prehistoric Planet treats them not as monsters but as living creatures with social bonds, instincts, and challenges. Gunton told us he wanted viewers to feel like they were stepping out of a time machine and watching real animals go about their lives, not staring at a digital museum exhibit.
That approach is why behavior, not biology, sits at the center of the show. The episodes follow creatures through migrations, hunts, births, standoffs, and harsh seasonal swings. The series shows dwarf stegodons hunted by giant storks, ten-foot otters muscling predators off kills, short-faced kangaroos evolving bizarre traits to survive the heat, and thylacoleo—the marsupial “lion”—executing ambush strategies inspired by both new science and ancient oral histories.
The Tech Making the Ice Age Feel Real
This season also leans more heavily than ever on technology. It has to. To make these animals believable, the team relies on techniques that sit somewhere between natural history and industrial-grade simulation.
The backbone is VFX, but visual effects aren’t the real story here. It’s the ecosystem of science, computation, and fieldwork supporting the imagery.
Teams used high-resolution photogrammetry to scan real landscapes across 15 countries. They used drone mapping to choreograph chases and interactions. They built full-scale puppets so camera operators could rack focus and pull shots the way they would with living animals—giving animators something physical to animate over instead of blank space.
Much of the most important work is invisible:
- permafrost carcasses scanned at extremely high resolution
- DNA used to infer coloration and closest relatives
- isotope analysis to reconstruct migration paths
- biome simulations to understand how ecosystems shifted as sea levels rose and fell
- skeletal modeling and articulation tests to determine how extinct animals actually moved
- keyframe animation guided by machine-learned gait analysis
Gunton described how the production’s needs sometimes drove new scientific discovery. When animators needed to know how a giant kangaroo would pivot mid-stride—or whether a thylacoleo could actually climb the way the story required—those questions went back to researchers.
That exchange between toolmakers, artists, and scientists is what grounds the show’s most surreal creatures in reality. It’s also a great example of how emerging technologies—scanning, simulation, biome modeling, AI-assisted movement studies—are reshaping natural history storytelling.
Digital Footprints and Modern Eyes
Because the Ice Age sits closer to us than the Mesozoic, realism matters more. These animals move like creatures we recognize. They behave like modern analogs. That raises the bar.
Dalton addressed the subtle parallels to shifts we are seeing today. He asked Gunton, “If these larger-than-life creatures that you’ve brought to life could disappear from relatively slow change, then what kind of challenges is the planet going to face now?”
That’s where the series gets interesting. It doesn’t preach. But it doesn’t need to. By building an authentic world—one shaped by climate shocks, shifting landscapes, and disappearing habitats—it forces viewers to draw their own conclusions.
When Real Footage Becomes CGI, and CGI Becomes Real
One of the clever tricks this season uses is a blend of real footage and CGI that’s so seamless it becomes a guessing game. Some shots begin with a real thorny devil or real landscapes before morphing into digital counterparts. Others reverse the flow. It’s done not as sleight of hand but to keep the viewer’s brain grounded in the familiar.
The result is a world that feels observed rather than invented.
Why It Matters Today
At its core, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is a story about adaptability. Some species thrived. Many vanished. Ecosystems changed shape. Landscapes shifted. The world responded to forces larger than any single creature.
That’s why the technology behind the show matters. Without the science and tools to reconstruct this world in detail, the Ice Age would still feel abstract—a distant idea rather than a living system. By making it look real, the show makes the stakes feel real.
And that’s the quiet power of this season: it uses every tool available, from VFX pipelines to permafrost genomics, to show how life responds when the world tilts off its axis. It’s entertainment, but also a reminder that the past has lessons we haven’t finished learning.