Life on Our Planet is an 8-episode Speculative Documentary released on Netflix on the 25th of October 2023. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it tells the story of life on Earth from its very beginning, and the trials all life-forms have to face.
The series is produced by Silverback Films and Amblin Television, even having Steven Spielberg executive produce and Industrial Light & Magic provide effects.
This series contains examples of:
- Always a Bigger Fish: In episode 2, a juvenile Dunkleosteus' jaws can't crack an ammonite's shell... but an adult's can.
- Anachronistic Animal: Due to recycling the models, Deinonychus, Arkansaurus, and a pliosaur show up in the Late Maastrichtian, although the former two at least had close relatives from the time period which they are probably meant to represent (since they are not identified and only appear as background animals).
- Artistic License – Biology:
- The animals are constantly making lots of sounds, especially predators when hunting. In reality animals are mostly quiet, especially predators as constantly giving away your position would mean going hungry.
- An entire group of Lystrosaurus doesn't run away from or try to bluff away an animal actively predating on them. Compare this to modern animals and this scene is frankly absurd.
- If viewed without dialogue one could easily mistake the Titanis confrontation for a courtship display as little in their behavior is akin to modern birds when showing aggression.
- A teenage mammoth goes down to a single cave lion jumping on its back when their modern relatives are capable of running with several lions on their back barely slowed down at all.
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- The show depicts animal groups dying out because a newer "superior" group outcompeted them, needless to say this idea is highly outdated.
Freeman: The Smilodon's mammalian cunning was one reason the terror birds went extinct."- The Cameroceras (actually based on material currently referred to Endoceras) has embedded cuttlefish-like eyes when they should be more like nauitiloids with buried eyestalks.
- The Deinonychus are depicted running down their Arkansaurus prey, when looking at their skeleton shows they couldn't sustain such chases, instead replying on ambush attacks. The arms on the models pronate when they run and their feathering is less than accurate. They're also presented as an example of sophisticated social behaviour evolution, but evidence for such is dubious at best.
- Triceratops is shown to be only able to fend off Tyrannosaurus by grouping together as a large herd, but there's no evidence of Triceratops living in more than small family units. It is also shown galloping away similar to a horse when their leg anatomy cannot do that.
- It's stated like Lystrosaurus died out because it was Too Dumb to Live, unable to recognize predators (specifically, it's shown not reacting to an erythrosuchid, yet it is known to have coexisted with the very similar Proterosuchus). There's zero evidence of this at all, and dicynodonts were still successful up until the end of the Triassic.
- The erythrosuchid is shown walking with a sprawling stance when its pelvic girdle shows it was an upright walker.
- The scene with Plateosaurus implies that it evolved into later sauropods, and that the dinosaurs in general had a smooth takeover during the Late Triassic. In reality, Plateosaurus and most other sauropodomorphs died out during the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, as well as many of the early dinosaurs. Only the lineages that survived to the Jurassic would go on to become the dinosaurs that later took over.
- Ammonites did not have an operculum and were not actually closely related to modern nautilus. In fact, nautilus are the modern cephalopod most distantly related to ammonites (the coiled shell is an ancestral state, lost in squids and octopuses).
- A Liopleurodon-like pliosaur is shown dying out in the K-Pg extinction event, despite them having already become extinct more than twenty million years prior (given the narration refers to merely as a "marine reptile" it might be an attempt to pass it off as a polycotylid, an unrelated lineage of short-necked plesiosaurs, or a mosasaur).
- The extinction event in general is heavily exaggerated in how devastating and quick it is. Note Basically, if the event was as bad as depicted, nothing would have survived (burrowing underground would not have worked).
- Alamosaurus are depicted galloping away from the tsunami churned up by the meteor impact. Needless to say, there's no way an animal so massive would be able to undertake such a high-speed stride.
- The cave lions are depicted as being whitish-grey like an Arctic wolf, but preserved fur indicates they were basically the same sandy colour as modern lions are (if not slightly lighter).
- The Allosaurus has strange proportions, with a much too small head, eyes facing too forwards, a long and skinny neck, gangling limbs, and skin covered in crocodilian armour and spines, of which there is no evidence. In fact, skin impressions from Allosaurus show that it had very tiny scales, to the point where it would have looked like leather from most distances.
- To a lesser degree, the Tyrannosaurus skull proportions are also unusual. The eyes are spaced really widely apart, the top of the head is smooth and lacks the prominent post-orbital crests it had, and the teeth inside the mouth are way too small and numerous (just the front of the upper jaw has sixteen teeth, which is twice the number there actually were). It is also covered in large feature scales and a row of large scales down its back despite skin impressions of T. rex and its close relatives lacking such features, with the largest scale impressions being smaller than 2 cm thick.
- The juvenile T. rexes appear acting as "herders" running down large prey while the adults ambush. Which is poorly supported by fossils showing that T. rex would have exhibited an ontogenetic niche shift with juveniles hunting swifter footed prey while adults hunted the larger herbivores, making such a strategy very impractical. Additionally evidence points to the fact that young tyrannosaurs were precocial and able to forage for themselves at a young age, similar to crocs, cassowaries, and chickens. It'd be much more likely for them to cooperatively hunt between individuals in the same age group, not to mention it is pretty nonsensical that a large herbivore would be scared by juvenile rexes.
- Smilodon is shown preying on an adult Titanis, but the species of Smilodon that lived with Titanis, S. gracilis, was by far the smallest species, and would've barely even come up to the ankle of Titanis in life, and would have been far too weak to bring one down, let alone with the ease displayed here. For that matter, the fact that it's hunting one at all is completely unrealistic, as given their respective sizes, S.gracilis probably would've actively fled from a confrontation with Titanis. It is also too pantherine in shape when Smilodons had longer and more laterally compressed muzzles.
- The Edmontosaurus model is based on the species E. regalis, which was replaced by the longer-skulled and likely crestless E. annectens by the end of the Cretaceous.
- Bait-and-Switch: An Anomalocaris manages to snatch up a trilobite… only to grapple at it fruitlessly and eventually release it, unable to break its shell.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- A Smilodon effortlessly takes down a Titanis with minimal effort. Its partner did not even have to join in.
- A cave lion instantly takes down a juvenile woolly mammoth much larger than it in one bite; the rest of its pride did not even have to contribute to bringing it down.
- Mama Bear: In the first episode, the Maiasaura mothers roar at anyone who gets close to their nests, which is a problem because all their nests are close together.
- Mammoths Mean Ice Age: The one sequence set in the ice age centres around a herd of woolly mammoths being hunted by cave lions.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The advertisements for the series showing roughly 80-90% prehistoric animals, with only "blink-and-you-miss-it" footage of modern day animals. In the show proper, the ratio is basically swapped.
- Rule of Cool: In some "making of" clips, the developers state they modified the designs of some of the animals mid-development just to make them look scarier and more intimidating (such as the Tyrannosaurus and the Titanis).
- Shown Their Work: A few examples.
- Unlike in prior documentaries, Anomalocaris is shown as being unable to break the shells of trilobites, which modern evidence supports.
- All dromaeosaurs are fully feathered. Tyrannosaurus, meanwhile, only has a sparse amount of feathers on its back.
- The juvenile T. rexes are accurately depicted with Jane-like proportions, as well as slender builds and feathers.
- Sickly Green Glow: In episode 2, a harmful algal bloom kills much of the sea life in the Devonian. This is depicted with a scene of a Dunkleosteus suffocating in green water.
- Social Ornithopod: The first episode shows Maiasaura travelling in herds with thousands of members.
- Too Dumb to Live: The Lystrosaurus is a very literal example, as they have no reaction to the erythrosuchid's arrival and just cluelessly walk up to the predator and let themselves be killed, with the narrator directly comparing them to dodos. Nevermind that in real life, Lystrosaurus did have to contend with predators such Proterosuchus and Moschorhinus, so dealing with predation would not have been an alien concept to them.
- The Worf Effect: A pair of Smilodon take down a Titanis with minimal effort in order to sell the narrative of how sabre-toothed cats and other mammalian carnivores outcompeted the terror birds, resulting in the latter's extinction... Though in real life this wasn't what happened.
