Line #4 TearJerker/PrehistoricPark


1	[[quoteright:480:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8714.jpeg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:480:The mother ''Tyrannosaurus'', killed.]]
3	Any program that deals with extinction, whether natural or man-made, can be very harsh and upsetting. In most cases, documentaries that feature the extinct creatures shown within this program, portray them at the height of their species' existence. Their eventual decline and disappearance are generally not touched upon or simply glossed over; the exception being the creatures from the KT extinction event.
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5	Although Prehistoric Park is a generally light-hearted series that explores the wonderful concept of bringing extinct creatures back to life, some of the animals are shown to be living in very harsh situations. In a number of cases, the audience was pleading with Nigel and the keepers to rescue them. Unfortunately, they did not always succeed.
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7	[[AC: General]]
8	* The series doesn't hold back on demonstrating just how cruel nature and extinction can be. Unlike what most people think, it's ''not'' an instantaneous thing most of the time.
9	** In the case of some of these animals, namely the late Cretaceous Dinosaurs and the Ice Age mammals, Nigel rescues them just before their species historically became extinct. While this is awesome for sci-fi fans, as it demonstrates just how much thought went into this series, it also means that we, as the audience, get to witness some very harsh and unwanted spectacles.
10	** [[FridgeLogic Nigel and his crew could travel through time, yet they couldn't arrive in time to save these animals?]]
11	*** Though it looked like they were taking the animals from the times during which they were becoming extinct, to not have as big an effect on the timeline... maybe.
12	** What's worse is that if you ignore the artistic licenses and fictional settings, some of the hardships we witness more than likely ''did'' happen during the decline and eventual extinction of these species.
13	*** There's one crucial difference between what the show depicts and what actually happened. While obvious on the surface, it's downright ''sobering'' once it truly hits you: unlike the show, no one was there to save even a single individual of these species from their fate in real life, and (barring the unlikely development that we really do invent TimeTravel someday) no one ever will be.
14	* With the exception of the ''Deinosuchus'', the animals Nigel brings to the park are saved from an event that would have otherwise seen their species as a whole wiped out, or at the very least, completely destroyed local populations.
15	** The ''Tyrannosaurus'', ''Triceratops'', and ''Ornithomimus'' are saved from the cataclysmic K-T extinction event.
16	** Martha, the ''Elasmotherium'', the Terror Bird, and the Sabre-Toothed Cats are saved from massive climate change that wiped out '''all''' of the large animals of their era.
17	** The dinosaurs rescued within "Dinobirds" and the giant insects of "Bug House" are saved from being burned alive in a volcanic eruption and a forest fire, respectively.
18	* The fact that all of these creatures are really gone in our modern world can be upsetting for some viewers.
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20	[[AC: The Dinosaurs]]
21	* The death of the mother ''Tyrannosaurus'' in "T-Rex Returns". Just before she dies, the mother lets out one last defiant roar at Nigel as a last-ditch attempt to [[MamaBear protect her babies]]. Nigel himself seemed shaken by the whole thing.
22	* In "Dinobirds", Nigel is able to save four Mircoraptors and the herd of Titanosaurs as the volcano in prehistoric China erupts. Unfortunately, the ''Incisivosaurus'' he encountered earlier were not among those saved.
23	* During "Saving the Sabretooth", the mother ''Ornithomimus'' rejects two of her eggs out of biological instinct. They're retrieved and Bob tries to hatch them in an incubator, but while all the other eggs hatch, these two don't. [[spoiler: Thankfully, they do hatch eventually, since Bob saw that the incubator's temperature was too low]].
24	* Terrance is brutally attacked and nearly eaten by Matilda in "Bug House". He receives a massive injury to his face as a result of the incident, which later becomes infected, leaving him seriously ill with septicemia. Suzanne and the veterinary staff are ultimately forced to take desperate measures and inject him with modern antibotics in an attempt to save his life, which may trigger a dangerous reaction with his prehistoric body. [[spoiler: Fortunately, it works, and Terrance makes a full recovery.]]
25	** This gets additionally upsetting when you remember that Terrance and Matilda are not only siblings, but the only family they have left. As youngsters, the pair played and hung around each other all the time. In "Dinobirds", Matilda suddenly turned on Terrance and the pair started fighting whenever they were in contact with one another. This forced Bob and the parkkeepers to separate them with a dividing wall built through their enclosure, so the pair could no longer physically harm each other. As shown in "Bug House", despite the keepers' best efforts, it didn't work. Matilda was just ''that'' determined to kill her brother.
26	** It's never fully understood why exactly Matilda became so hostile towards Terrance, either.
27	** Midway through the episode, when Suzanne goes to check up on Terrance, he's clearly struggling just to stand up. As seen in a closeup, his head is down, his eyes are half-open, and he's constantly groaning in pain, showing that he's clearly not well. ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' is usually portrayed as an invincible killing machine that fears nothing and can stand up to almost anything, but this scene shows another side to the dino that is rarely considered, demonstrating that it was just as vulnerable as any of us.
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29	[[AC: Martha]]
30	* In "A Mammoth Undertaking", Nigel travels to the very end of the Ice Age, where he spends quite some time looking for mammoths. After he finally finds what are heavily implied to be the last two mammoths on the continent, he sees that one of them is dead, stabbed to death by prehistoric human hunters. He soon realises that the second mammoth, who will go on to be named Martha, was brutally injured trying to protect her herdmate, stabbed with a spearhead that ultimately got stuck inside her thick skin, leaving her very sickly from the resultant infection. To make things even worse, Martha either doesn't appear to understand, or refuses to accept, that her fellow mammoth is dead, as she keeps calling out to the dead one desperately searching for a reply or some other sign of life.
31	** After Martha collapses from her injury, Nigel goes over to the dead mammoth, who he suspects was Martha's sister. The close-up shots make it very clear that the death wasn't quick nor painless.
32	** After this, Nigel tells the audience that although mammoth populations declined due to climate change, it was human hunting that ultimately drove them to extinction. In spite of this, he indicates that the Ice Age hunters can be forgiven because they legitimately didn't understand what they were doing, and were ultimately just trying to survive in a harsh, cruel environment. Pointing at the dead mammoth's body, he then says (with transparent bitterness) that modern humans have [[HumansAreTheRealMonsters no such excuse]] for this behavior. Even after ten thousand years, and with a better understanding of nature and the creatures within it, modern people ''still'' do this type of thing to endangered animals in the 21st century. For anyone who's a conservationist or animal lover, it's a truly sobering punch to the gut.
33	** Later in the episode, when Martha refuses to eat, Nigel travels back further into the Ice Age to find the right kind of plants for her. He returns with some authentic Ice Age grasses (and an ''Elasmotherium''), but when she still refuses to eat, Nigel quickly realizes that the vegetation isn't the issue: Martha is lonely. Fossil evidence shows that just like their modern relatives, only bull Mammoths lived solitary lives, while females lived in closely-related herds, as is shown in Nigel's second visit to the Ice Age. Not only does this make Martha's situation all the more upsetting, but it also explains why she was so [[HarsherInHindsight reluctant to leave her dead relative.]]
34	* At the end of the episode, the parkkeepers appear to resolve the issue by introducing Martha to the matriarch of the park's resident elephant herd. For the majority of the series, all is well between them, but in "Supercroc", the matriarch who accepted Martha starts becoming aggressive towards the mammoth. As a result, Martha becomes isolated again, refused interaction with any other elephant, with the exception of the matriarch's baby. [[spoiler: The situation ends positively, however, when Martha saves the baby from Matilda during the breakout, earning the herd's appreciation and acceptance.]]
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36	[[AC: The Sabretooths]]
37	* The second half of "Saving the Sabretooth" is arguably the biggest demonstration of just how cruel nature and extinction can be. It's not at all pleasant to watch, as more than a few fans have admitted that rewatching it can be very difficult.
38	** When Nigel and big cat expert Saba Douglas-Hamilton finally track down their quarry, the pair mourn the state that the cats are in. Namely, the species is dying of starvation after the big, slow-moving mammals they used to feed on died out.
39	** In fact, one of the very first discoveries they make is a freshly dead cub. Saba is the one who finds it, but is very clearly devastated. When Nigel arrives soon afterwards, the pair reluctantly acknowledge that there's nothing physically wrong with the cub, except that it's very thin. Despite her best efforts, the cub's mother just couldn't save it.
40	*** The thing to remember is that, as naturalists who have worked/studied alongside many animals, Nigel and Saba have probably witnessed scenes like this in real life.
41	* The contrast between the Sabretooth living 1 million years ago to those living 10,000 years ago is greatly upsetting. In the former time, Sabretooth food is plentiful and the cats have little trouble finding it. After one of them makes a kill, the rest of its family arrive to join the buffet. When the group finally leaves, there's still plenty of meat on the carcass (which they can freely return to) for other animals to eat. In the latter time, towards the end of the Ice Age, we find that the relic population of Sabretooths are barely able to find any food. As mentioned earlier, the large creatures they hunted are gone, leaving behind smaller and nimbler species that the cats simply cannot catch. The impact of this food shortage was so strong, that the groups they once lived in no longer exist, and the cats now live solitary existences.
42	** This plight is demonstrated further when Saba and Nigel witness the dead cub's mother stalking a deer. Their comments serve to demonstrate that the attack is one of pure desperation to avoid starvation. As Nigel points out, the mother is simply not built to catch a fleet-footed animal like this, and Saba points out that the cat has paid no attention to her surroundings or wind direction. Despite this probably being one of the few times to freely root for the carnivore, when the deer inevitably realizes the mother's presence, it ''easily'' outruns her.
43	* Following the hunt, the pair follow the female back to her den, where they find that she has ''a second'' cub. The two cats are clearly at death's door, as both mother and child groan audibly, clearly in agony. Shortly after this, [[OhCrap a young male sabretooth shows up]]. Knowing that he could effortlessly attack and [[OffingTheOffspring kill the cub]], Nigel and Saba tranquilize and capture him first. Once this is done, the pair rush back to the den... only to discover that their delay [[UnwittingInstigatorofDoom sealed the cub's fate.]]
44	** Just like Martha did with her herd mate, the mother sabretooth desperately nuzzles her dead baby, trying to get ''some'' sort of response from it, to no avail. By the time Saba darts the grieving mother, she herself is virtually in tears.
45	** The narrator's comment does not help matters.
46	---> '''Narrator''': Starvation has killed her cubs... and it's killing ''her'', too.
47	* Things get a little better in the next two episodes, since the two Sabretooths are nursed back to health, become mates, and have a litter of their own. Suzanne unfortunately learns that the mother can no longer produce milk for the new cubs. This forces her to hand-rear them, since they would have died otherwise. Although all four cats end up completely fine, it's still a little upsetting that the mother and father couldn't raise their babies themselves.

Context TearJerker / PrehistoricPark