Life On Our Planet Review

Prehistoric Planet seems to indeed have heralded a new age of prehistoric documentaries, and some like this one take new creative insights. Rather than being something akin to a David Attenborough documentary, Life On Our Planet jumps around between different eras, explaining the various principles of evolution and even cutting to modern wildlife scenes to illustrate the point.

Unfortunately, it falls rather short on two main ways:

• The animation and animal depictions just aren’t up to par. Maybe this is an unfair critique given that it probably didn’t have the budget of Prehistoric Planet, but many of the extinct taxa don’t have the same level of care put into them and either look cartoony or like outdated depictions.
• It has way too many inaccuracies. The first episode, for instance, boasts that sharks are living fossils (something long understood to not be the case), that terror birds were outcompeted by sabertoothed cats (also long understood to not be the case) and that mammals “were a footnote” in the time of the dinosaurs (Repenomamus and others disagree)

That said, the series has a few redeeming moments, like the accurate orthoceratids and focus on Permian life forms. Just wish they would fully cancel the shortcomings.