Literature / The Future is Wild

The Future is Wild is a Speculative Biology franchise that speculates on the possibility of how life might evolve in the future, focusing entirely on three distinct eras: an Ice Age 5 million years into the future, a wetter, warmer era 100 million years from now, and a period 200 million years ahead in which all the continents have merged into one again.

It began with a TV Speculative Documentary miniseries produced by Britain and the United States that aired on Animal Planet and Discovery Channel in 2003. Each of the 13 episodes covered a different environment from one of the three time periods, as well as the animals that inhabited such places. A companion book co-written by consultant Dougal Dixon (who also wrote its Spiritual Predecessor After Man: A Zoology of the Future) and producer Joanna Adams was released alongside the show. The series was a huge hit with viewers, spawning various pieces of merchandise and even theme park exhibitions in Japan and France.

The series also spawned a CGI children's animated series produced by Nelvana. This Animated Adaptation starred a teenage girl from ten thousand years into the future named C.G. who explores the environments featured in the miniseries alongside a group of twenty-first century teens (Luis, Emily, and Ethan) — as well as a future squid — picked up by accident. It ran for 26 episodes on Teletoon and Discovery Kids from 2007-2008. Tropes for the cartoon can be found here.

A documentary film version of the series was originally set to be picked up by Warner Bros., however, the series may be rebooted by Vanguard Animation and broadcasting at HBO. There are also plans for a Virtual Reality game based on the series by the studio CGARTIST in development. But time will tell if anything comes out of all this.

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The Future is Wild documentary-styled miniseries provides examples of:

• After the End:
  • The premise is about how life will evolve millions of years after humans have disappeared (either dying out in the UK version or traveling through space in the US version).
  • The 200 MYH episodes are set 100 MY after a cataclysmic mass extinction event wiped out most life on Earth, including all land animals except a small number of certain invertebrates.
• Allegorical Character: Virtually every portrayed animal is a summation of a recurring evolutionary process in the history of Earth. See Characters for specific examples.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Twice, in the same episode. A huge, predatory silverswimmer is warned away when it gets too close to the even bigger rainbow squid, which later falls prey to the pack-hunting sharkopath (which are, ironically, much smaller than both the predatory silverswimmer and rainbow squid).
• Apocalypse How: Class 4, Planetary Species Extinction.
  • In the US release, humans simply left to settle/live in space. The probes documenting the various creatures were sent by them/their descendants.
  • In the UK release, humans are extinct but it's never said exactly how they went extinct. In nature, there are two ways an animal can become extinct: by being killed off, or by evolving enough that you're eventually considered a different species. The US version and the UK version are not mutually exclusive: humans could have gone off into space and diverged into multiple "alien" species over the millions of years, thus rendering Homo sapiens to be extinct while leaving other species of humans alive.
  • 100-200 MYH, a series of massive volcanic eruptions, a meteor strike, and the continents colluding into a single giant occupied by mostly desert all collude to wipe out most lifeforms, including all tetrapods, leaving fish and invertebrates, such as molluscs, insects, and polychaete worms, to inherit the world left over.
• Artistic License – Biology: Some of the predictions are at best unlikely and not exempt from the Rule of Cool and Author Appeal. Your mileage may vary.
  • The Megasquid is easily the most controversial creature in the show, as it is a terrestrial eight-ton animal with no bones or internal skeleton that supports its weight with muscle power alone. This is unlikely due to the sheer stress force of its weight without any rigid structures, with the largest land invertebrate ever being 6-foot giant millipedes (and even those had exoskeletons for support).
  • The Spink. Eusocial bird? Maybe. Eusocial flightless burrowing bird? Less likely. Eusocial flightless burrowing bird with proportions completely different from any real bird? Getting increasingly unlikely. All of that happening in under five million years, from the starting point of a quail, an animal that does none of those things? Er... Not to mention rodents have already evolved eusocial burrowing forms multiple times, and they are still around when the Spink lives and even coexist with it, so even in the case of current burrowing rodents (like prairie dogs) going extinct due to human activity, any current generalist species of mice would have most likely beaten up birds for that niche before they even started. This concept would have made more sense in a much later time like the 100 MYH segment, particularly in an island-continent with no native land vertebrates like Antarctica.
  • In a similar, but inverted case, the Deathgleaner is a diurnal predatory bat filling the niche of a bird of prey, unlikely to be opened for bats in a world where better-suited birds are still common. Using skin for sustentation, bat wings have much poorer thermoregulation than bird wings; they overheat in the sun (which is why most bats are nocturnal, a lifestyle for which birds are generally more poorly suited than mammals, and diurnal species live under the shade of rainforests), and also deal worse with the cold, which is why there aren't bats in the Arctic. The show handwaves this by having the Deathgleaner live in a cold northern desert and be active during the day (i.e. making the best of both bad situations) but it is still unbelievable that a generalist predatory bird wouldn't have beaten bats for that niche after birds of prey went extinct. On top of that, the Deathgleaner cannot attack its prey directly from the air (like fishing bats can, for example) but has to land and clumsily move on the ground first, where its hypothetical ancestors would have been themselves vulnerable to predators. Unsurprisingly the only bats that resorted to this evolved in New Zealand, which is devoid of native land mammals (and too cold for large predatory reptiles), unlike the North American continent in the show.
  • The Titan Dolphin shown in the prototype VR game is a completely absurd depiction of cetacean anatomy: it is terrestrial and walks on its forelimbs like a theropod dinosaur, meaning that its torso is entirely ribcage and it has no space for internal organs whatsoever. The original art instead shows something more like a slug- or seal-like ambush predator. The question remains of how a member of a group of large, macropredatory oceanic vertebrates, which are practically the first to go extinct from global climate changes would survive for hundreds of millions of years and even make its way back to the continent against all odds and possible better-suited competitors, moreso when the original show had cetacens all go extinct by just 5 MYH.
  • The Desert Hopper is a rabbit-sized snail that stands and moves around on in an erect, upright posture, like a bird, but only with one foot. Monopods like this are bio-mechanically unlikely: it's more energy intensive to move compared to two or more legs, it's hard to balance, it puts a lot of pressure on the body since the animal is constantly slamming up and down with no support from another leg etc., and the episode never explains how a land animal with no bones could be standing upright, never mind hopping, on top of that. A likelier scenario could see future snails not jumping or hopping per se, but maybe looping or inching along like modern-day inchworm caterpillars in order to minimize contact with the hot sand; rolling motion or non-drying mucous coverings could also help.
  • The forests of future Antarctica are dominated by petrels. These are highly specialized seabirds that had literally countless opportunities to become terrestrial since they're usually the first birds to arrive to newly formed oceanic islands, yet never did. More likely, Antarctica would come to be dominated by descendants of terrestrial birds and bats blown away from other continents by storms, much like it happened historically in islands (and is the canonical origin of the insects appearing in the same segment).
  • The primary reason giant flying insects do not exist anymore is not as much because of lower oxygen levels in the present, but due to competition with vertebrate flying animals. Thus the niche of the Falconfly would likely be taken by a bird or large carnivorous bat, but that's a lot less interesting. Hell, the original petrels the show has branching into insectivorous and nectarivorous species (along with every other bird niche in Antarctica, implicitly) already are vicious predators of vertebrates.
  • The Falconfly is portrayed leaving behind chunks of meat for its underground larvae. However, the stock footage used is of a beetle grub rather than a wasp larvae, which, unlike beetle larvae, do not have discernible faces.
  • The Toraton is a giant tortoise filling the niche of a sauropod, and growing to sizes as large as the largest of them. However, this is a bit of a problem as sauropods, like most dinosaurs, had relatively lightweight pneumatized skeletons with efficient respiratory systems, which allowed them to save on weight and get more oxygen to sustain their enormous bodies. Tortoises, lacking both features, would be unable to reach such sizes as they are too dense and heavy to grow much larger.
  • It's mentioned that the Toraton is too large to mount one another during mating, as the adults are too heavy, so instead they mate back-to-back with a cloacal kiss. Strangely, it does not mention the fact male turtles have very large and mobile penises, so a cloacal kiss would be unnecessary (perhaps they thought this option would be too vulgar?).
  • Babookaris have long, well developed tails that are used for communication. This is unlikely to evolve from uakaris, who have short, almost vestigial tails. Babookaris would be likelier to descend from Capuchin monkeys, who have long tails and are both more generalist and more intelligent than uakaris (even using stone tools).
  • Among the species that live in the modern Amazon rainforest, peccaries are mentioned as one of the animals that are too specialized for the jungle habitat to survive its transition to grassland. However, peccaries are actually highly adaptable and all three species already live in dry, grassland habitats (and can even adapt to live in urban environments and deserts). If anything, they should be one of the current rainforest denizens most likely to survive.
  • The Rainbow Squid is a gargantuan active marine predator (stated to be 25 metres in length), far larger than any marine macropredator that has ever been known to exist in Earth's history, yet instead of preying on large animals, or even preying on large numbers of small animals like giant baleen whales do, it has an extremely complex and high-effort method of hunting comparatively tiny prey (namely, ocean flish) singly, which would realistically not be enough to sustain it.
  • It's stated that, 100 MYH, all coral has gone extinct because of how sensitive they are to changes in the environment, and reefs are instead made up of red algae. There seems to have been a misconception to how corals work, because while coral reefs are sensitive to environmental changes, corals are incredibly diverse and adaptable (they've survived the entire Phanerozoic Eon after all), in the same way jungles are sensitive habitats, but trees are not sensitive as a whole. And even if corals became extinct, the very closely related and similar sea anemones could have replaced them. Reefs have also historically been made up of animal types (if not coral, then crinoids, bivalves or sponges), due to their ability to produce motile larvae, supplement photosynthesis by feeding on plankton, and grow hard skeletons to strengthen themselves, none of which algae can do.
  • The spitfire beetles' mimicry of the spitfire flower to hunt the spitfire bird would be rather clunky to implement in real life because the beetles have to face away from the bird in order to mimic the flower, unlike actual arthropods (like mantises, spiders, or ambush bugs) which mimic flowers that make sure to put their face towards where their quarry is approaching. The beetles also lack any sort of mandibles or raptorial forelimbs which it could use to quickly dispatch its prey, unlike real flower mimic predators.
  • The great blue windrunner is able to fly in the thin air of the Great Plateau by using its back legs as a secondary pair of wings. This couldn't actually work in real life because birds can't pivot their legs horizontally like that, they would pop right out of the pelvic sockets. Also, the windrunner would actually be better protected against UV radiation if it had dark feathers, rather than light, as melanin would absorb much of the radiation before it gets to the skin. Birds are also naturally resistant to UV radiation due to producing the chemical gadusol. A number of birds frequently soar higher than the Himalayas already, and have no special adaptations for it.
  • It is unusual that the Gryken, a large, ground-dwelling mustelid, evolved from a highly specialized arboreal mustelid species (the European tree marten), rather than one of the many mustelid species that already live on the ground and are adapted for winding through tunnels, such as weasels, minks, or stoats. Especially because the following Amazon Grassland episode states how specialized forest animals will struggle to adapt as the forest rapidly disappears. It almost seems like the producers picked the least likely mustelid for the gryken's ancestor.
  • The Ratch is a rodent-descendant from either 20 or 50 MYH only appearing in artwork for the cancelled game. It is supposedly a scavenger, but instead of robust bone-cracking molars it has a pair of very long, thin looking fangs with no apparent purpose... that are impossible to evolve in rodents as they have no fangs at all. Indeed, Dougal Dixon's previous stab at a predatory rat descendant in After Man, the wolf-like Falanx and relatives, used piercing incisors to dispatch prey like the Pleistocene Thylacoleo. Adding insult to injury, the Ratch has a full set of four upper incisors like primates (yet none in the lower jaw?), when real rodents only have the two used by the Falanx. The Ratch is also supposedly specialized in retrieving "bodies from the mud" yet it has no obvious adaptations to a muddy environment like short legs, flat feet, rotund body, or hairlesness; it rather looks like a skin-wrapped, woolly bear. And to top it all off, it doesn't even seem to have eyes.
  • The South American rattleback is also supposed to be a rodent, but its face looks a lot more like a reptile, never mind a mammal, since it's covered in scales, has no ears or whiskers, and most glaringly of all no cheeks.
  • The idea of the world 200 MYA being claimed by the invertebrates is highly implausible given that there are still fish around, as internal skeletons give colossal advantages toward large-bodied animals in any environment - namely in beating the Square-Cube Law. The odds of the Megasquid evolving are less likely than fish evolving a new variety of terrestrial forms as they did in the Devonian. Similarly, Silverswimmers would likely be replaced by shark-derivatives past a certain size, as no marine arthropod has gotten anywhere close to the larger specimens seen in the show.
• Artistic License – Geology: The mountains of the Great Plateau are said to be 33,000 feet tall. This is unlikely, because the height of mountains is limited by Earth's gravity — Mt. Everest's 29,028-foot height is essentially the limit for how tall a mountain can be without collapsing under its own weight. However, there are mountains that exceed Everest's height; the summit of Mt. Chimborazo is over 6,800 feet farther from the center of the Earth than Everest's peak due to the Earth's bulge at the Equator. In addition, there are mountains taller than Everest like Mauna Kea at about 33,500 feet, but mostly hidden under water, so a mountain can be far taller than Everest if a) they're near the equator, and b) if the water level is lower, which is very possible if there's an Ice Age. Neither of these apply to the Great Plateau, though.
• Artistic License – Paleontology:
  • In the American version, when describing the evolution of the carakillers, an image of a pterosaur is shown and erroneously described as a flying dinosaur. Not only are they a separate group of reptiles altogether, but birds are the direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs such as T. rex.
  • It's stated the the snowstalker is only the second carnivore in history to evolve sabre teeth after the sabre-toothed cats. This is patently false, as sabre-teeth have evolved many, many times amongst therapsids; they even predate mammals, as they are first known in the gorgonopsids, which existed more than two-hundred million years before sabre-toothed cats evolved.
• Ascended to Carnivorism:
  • The babookaris (descending from frugivorous New World Monkeys) of the future have gone from eating fruit, to eating fish. This isn't particularly far-fetched, as most species of primate are some level of omnivorous as it is.
  • The slithersucker... in a way. The slime moulds of today are passive detritivores or otherwise feed only on microbes, while the slithersucker actively creates its own compost by trapping and killing small flying animals like flish and insects, and growing from their rotting carcasses.
• Bat Out of Hell: The Deathgleaner, a species of giant predatory bats inhabiting the deserts the new Ice Age.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Silver spiders, falconflies, slickribbons... hell, the future seems to be especially wild for invertebrates.
• Big Damn Heroes: The squibbons rescue one of their young from a megasquid. It actually plays out like a Saturday-Morning Cartoon.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Employed by the Rainbow Squid to put on amazing light displays during mating, as well as Sharkopaths that use it to signal to each other when hunting down rainbow squids.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: The ocean phantom uses extensible sails to direct its journeys via wind power. The megasquid's numerous walking-tentacles give it a unique gait. Most terabyte castes are Too Important to Walk, but are carried by the transporter caste.
• Blob Monster: The Slithersucker is a descendant of a slime mould which has evolved to be far more actively predatory and animal-like, including hunting forest flish (in a manner similar to modern sundew plants) for sustenance and tricking megasquids into consuming them by reshaping themselves to resemble fruit, in order to spread the mould across the jungle.
• Bowdlerise: In the British version, humanity is extinct... and there is a subtle implication that we did it to ourselves and took the remaining megafauna with us in the process. In the American version, it simply left to colonize the stars.
• Brains Versus Brawn: The predator-prey relationship of the rainbow squid and the sharkopath is presented in this manner, although in practice it's nuanced. The squid has no offensive capabilities, relying only on its highly sophisticated camouflaging abilities, but the shark has senses that can see through it, and the teamwork required to bring down such huge prey.
• Canon Discontinuity: The announced VR game... did the people behind it even watch the show?
  • The show has cetaceans entirely extinct by just 5 million years in the future, due to human activity. Yet the game's announcement features prominently a cetacean descendant 195 million years later, the Titan Dolphin.
  • Artwork for the game includes flying squids, with no other flying species present. While squids colonized the land by that time in the show, this niche was occupied by fish descendants.
• Canon Foreigner: The Japanese manga tie-in includes some animals which did not appear in the documentary series or other books, such as a whale shark-like silverswimmer (Global Ocean), a lizard with external ears (Amazon Grassland), a striped shark (Shallow Sea), and amphibious mantis shrimps (Bengal Swamp).
• Carcass Sleeping Bag: Bumblebeetle larvae inhabit flish carcasses both for food and protection from the dryness of the desert.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: Not cockroaches per se, but the series ends with the implication that the descendants of squid will evolve into a new civilization. It's squid that get this treatment, with the tree-dwelling ape-like squibbon implied to be the ancestor of a future sapient species of squid people (or "squeople").
• Convection, Schmonvection: The rattleback can survive the wildfires that are common to the Amazon grasslands by hunkering into the earth and letting the flames pass over its fireproof scales. This strategy seems to gloss over the fact that it would still be cooked by the extremely high air temperature.
• Crapsaccharine World: This is pretty much the Poggle's natural habitat. They are farmed by Silver Spiders, who provide them with loads of food, look after them, and protect them until they are fully grown, at which point they are brutally slaughtered and fed to the spider colony's queen.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • This causes some species to go extinct. Most monkeys die out once the Amazon rainforest gives way to vast grasslands, being unable to deal with a sudden change in lifestyle, though the Babookari is one notable exception.
  • Terabytes have it in the literal and trope sense. Most of the castes are overspecialized in their job to the point where their legs are vestigial or even completely absent. As such, they require a transporter caste to carry them around.
• Cub Cues Protective Parent:
  • The Deathgleaners attempt to prey on a baby Rattleback, but are forced to retreat when its distress cries bring its much larger and angrier mother charging the bats.
  • Although it's not necessarily the parent, the killing of a toraton hatchling by the swampus makes a nearby adult toraton rather annoyed. Downplayed example, as the toratons are not necessarily out for revenge, per se, they just happen to wander into Swampus territory in search of their missing baby, and unknowingly trample the Swampus nursery plants.
• Dark Is Not Evil: A few of the more cute and harmless future critters, such as the Spinks and Desert Hoppers, are mostly nocturnal and come out at night to avoid the heat and the predators.
• Death World: The Mediterranean Salt Flats are easily the harshest ecosystem shown in the program. The sea has become a sweltering, barren wasteland of salt and a few hypersaline lakes. Outside of the rocky outcroppings that used to be islands, the only creatures able to survive are cryptiles and brine flies.
• Dire Beast: Many of the creatures shown are imagined as gigantic, or at least bigger, descendants or relatives of modern-day animals:
  • Snow stalker and gryken = dire mustelids
  • Shag rat = dire marmot (but occupying the niche of a musk ox)
  • Deathgleaner = dire bat (bigger than modern flying foxes—though some versions of the show give its wingspan as a mere 1.3 m or 4 feet, smaller than even flying foxes)
  • Ocean phantom = dire Portuguese man-of-war
  • Toraton = dire giant tortoise—i.e., a dire dire tortoise?
  • Falconfly= dire wasp
  • Rainbow squid = dire Giant Squid or Colossal Squid. (In other words, a dire dire squid.)
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: Inverted. Exactly 100 million years from the present day, a massive spike in global volcanic activity wipes out over 90% of all life.
• Expy: There many species that take heavy inspiration from Dixon's earlier work, After Man: A Zoology of the Future, differing from them in only minor details.
  • Snow Stalker: Bardelot
  • Shagrat: Woolly Gigantelope
  • Gannetwhale: Vortex and Porpin
  • Cryptile: Fin lizard
  • Gryken: Pamthret
  • Scrofa: Zarander and Turmi
  • Spink: Termite Burrower
  • Great Blue Windrunner: Bootie Bird
  • Rattleback: The Grassland Rattleback is an expy of the Testadon and Spine-tailed Squirrel. The Desert Rattleback is an expy of the Rootsucker.
• Draw Aggro: Before baby swampuses are allowed to venture into open water, their mother draws away any predators nearby by using herself as bait, and then camouflaging herself to lose her pursuer and doubling back once the threat has been drawn far enough away.
• Extinct in the Future: The series begins at 5 MYH with nearly all modern megafauna having died out due to humanity's activities, until about 100 MYH, there's only one species of rodent left out of all mammals. By 200 MYH, all tetrapods have died out.
• Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: Many creatures are expies of other animal species, both living and extinct, since they all fill similar ecological niches, and were subject to convergent evolution. For example, Shagrats are rodent musk oxen, Snow Stalkers are mustelid polar bears, Gannetwhales are avian walruses, Deathgleaners are mammalian hawks, Spinks are avian gophers, Babookaris are new world monkeys behaving like baboons, Carakillers are falcons acting like terror birds, Toratons are tortoise counterparts to sauropods, Flish are fish behaving like birds, Desert Hoppers are snails acting like kangaroos and Squibbons are squids acting like monkeys. The ocean phantom is basically a siphonophorae jellyfish writ large.
• Feathered Fiend: The Carakiller. Also, while only trying to defend themselves, both the Gannetwhale and the Spitfire have very lethal defense mechanisms.
• Flooded Future World: The 100 million years segment takes place in this sort of world, where the ice caps have melted completely and shallow seas are much larger than they are today, with oceans now covering four-fifths of the planet.
• From a Single Cell: The ocean phantom can survive and regenerate being ripped to pieces due to being a colonial organism. As long as each piece has at least one of each caste type, each piece can regrow into a full jellyfish.
• Full-Boar Action: Heavily downplayed with the scrofa, a descendant of the modern wild boar. It's only half as big and much more lightly built, but adults are more than tough enough to fight off their main predator, the weasel-like grykens.
• Flying Seafood Special: The two species of flish. Most people would assume a flying fish would evolve from modern gliding species (or at least any pelagic one), but the makers decided to make it a codfish descendant.
• Giant Equals Invincible: An adult toraton, said to weigh up to 120 tons, is immune from any possible predator.
• Giant Flyer:
  • The Great Blue Windrunner. The sources don't seem to agree on its size; some offer a realistic approach at 3 meters (about the same size as the largest modern flying birds), but the official site states a wingspan of 15 meters, which would make flight impossible given how thin the atmosphere is at the altitudes it flies at and how narrow its wings are (though it can increase the wing area by raising its legs, which have wing feathers).
  • The deathgleaner bats are pretty big too, roughly around the size and wingspan of modern flying foxes or slightly bigger.
• Giant Squid: The rainbow squid is a gigantic predatory squid up to thirty meters long, with extraordinary colour-changing skills, allowing it to flash like a neon street sign, mimic a shoal of silverswimmers, or turn itself nearly invisible. It's still not the top predator of its time period, however.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The carakillers killing the babookari, the snowstalker killing shagrats, and the sharkopaths killing the rainbow squid all omit actually showing the killing blows in favour of POV shots of the predators attacking the screen.
• History Repeats:
  • 5 MYH, the interglacial period has ended and the icecaps have grown exponentially once more. Great herds of woolly, snow-dwelling grazers have evolved, and vicious sabre-toothed predators that hunt them as well, just as in the prior ice age. Likewise, giant predatory birds have once again evolved in South America, and the Mediterranean has once again emptied as the Straits of Gibraltar closed.
  • 100 MYH, rising oxygen levels in the atmosphere have allowed the return of giant arthropods which existed 300 MY before the present day, and similarly concludes with a destructive flood basalt eruption just like the end-Permian extinction event. Gigantic reptiles also roam the land again, while mammals have been reduced to tiny rodents once more.
  • 200 MYH, all the world's continents have fused back together again, creating a single vast interior desert and one immense ocean, just as it had 200 MYA.
• Hive Caste System: Similar to modern termites, the future terabytes, which descend from termites, have numerous castes to accomplish different roles in a colony. These have become even more varied and specialized in the hostile desert environment of Pangaea II. There are gum-spitters which spit fast-hardening glue to entrap garden worms, rock-borers, which spit strong acid to melt tunnels through rock, water-carriers, which have sac-like bodies to drink and transport lots of water, biters, which gnaw through rock and defend the colony, carriers, who transport the other immobile castes, the queen, and the nurses, which feed the queen the green algae they harvest from the garden worms and farm.
• Hostile Weather: 200 MYH, in the warmer climate and different distribution of winds in the future, super-hurricanes known as hypercanes can form which are far more powerful than any storms in the present day.
• Humanity's Wake: The British version is set after humanity's extinction; the American version changed it so that the human race simply left the system.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted:
  • 100 million years in the future, the predator/prey roles in the Antarctic Jungle have reversed, and bugs now prey on birds instead of the other way around.
  • The Ocean Phantom preys on small aquatic creatures such as young Reef Gliders. Reef Gliders that make it to adulthood become its predator, and the Ocean Phantom requires help from Spindletroopers to fend them off.
• Informed Ability: The carakillers have re-evolved claws on their forelimbs, which are said to be used to kill and rip apart their prey, but we never see this in action. The animation shows it killing prey with its huge beak.
• Irony:
  • In today's age, flying predatory birds hunt for small burrowing mammals they can carry off to eat. In the cold Kansas desert, however, it's flying predatory mammals that hunt for small burrowing birds.
  • 100 MYH, Antarctica is located in the Tropics and has rainforests of its own, while Australia is a high, mountainous patch of land near the Arctic.
  • The Poggle is the last placental mammal, a rodent descendant. Its homeland is Australia, which was the last continent to be colonized by placental mammals back in their heyday.
  • The megasquid is a cephalopod filling the niche of an elephant, two animals known for being surprisingly intelligent. However, the megasquid itself is notably very small-brained and nowhere near as clever as the tiny Squibbons.
  • The rainforest 200 MYH (the wettest part of the new Pangaea) is centered around what is Western Sahara today.
• It Can Think: Occasionally, the extraordinary survival tactics of certain animals are examined, usually based off of preexisting animals, but pushed to new extremes.
  • The Babookaris making tools as complex as fish traps shows they are more intelligent than chimpanzees.
  • Unlike almost all birds-of-prey today, the Carakillers are strategic pack hunters like wolves, using numbers, communication, and cunning to hunt the wily Babookaris, which are too swift to catch on their own.
  • Similarly, the Sharkopaths, unlike present day sharks but more like present-day killer whales, hunt in coordinated schools, communicating with one another using bioluminescent markings. This allows them to take down very large prey, such as the twenty metre long rainbow squid, itself a very intelligent predator.
  • The squibbons are likely the ultimate example of the series, with intelligence and behaviour equivalent to great apes, including strong family bonds and tool use. It's implied that squibbons may eventually grow even more intelligent and evolve into the next sapient race.
• Just Before the End: The 100 MYH episodes are set right before a massive extinction event wipes out most life on Earth.
• Kaiju: The Toraton. Weighing 120 tonnes and 15 times the size of an elephant, the Toraton is the biggest land animal ever to live (dwarfing even the largest known dinosaur, the 90-ton Argentinosaurus).
• Killer Rabbit:
  • The Spitfire Bird looks like a harmless orange bird, but it can shoot hot toxin from its nasal cavity.
  • The Snowstalker and Gryken are mustelids, and like their relatives from the time of humans, they are both cute and vicious. Downplayed compared to the Spitfire Bird: they are larger than the largest modern mustelid, the wolverine, and they have exposed sabre teeth which make them look scarier.
• Kill Steal: A falconfly kills a spitfire bird that was about to be ambushed by a pack of spitfire beetles (because the falconfly knows that spitfire birds only visit spitfire flowers when they're running on empty).
• Last of His Kind: 100 million years in the future, nearly all mammals are extinct. The only one left is the Poggle, a tiny rodent-like animal farmed by giant spiders in mountain caves.
• Living Relic: Various living-fossil species in this future. Sharks are still around 200 million years from now and are largely unchanged from when they first evolved nearly 400 million years ago.
• Light Is Not Good: The Sharkopaths, whose yellow bioluminescence fits them well. They're very ferocious and co-operative predators that viciously hunt and kill the more gentle Rainbow Squid. Also, one of the main problems for life in the high plateau is ultraviolet radiation, and thus both the Windrunner and the Silver Spider reflect it, looking as if glowing in blue and silver light respectively.
• Long-Lived: While their exact lifespan isn't mentioned, the toratons take a very long time to reach adulthood, as expected from a tortoise bigger than the largest dinosaur. Parents care for their offspring for thirty years.
• Man-Eating Plant: The Deathbottle is a huge, desert-dwelling carnivorous plant that works like a pitfall trap, allowing the rabbit-sized desert hoppers to blunder into its disguised digestive chamber, where they are impaled and subdued by the lining of poisonous spikes. It also makes a non-fatal trap to catch Bumblebeetles, which are used to transport its seeds.
• Mimic Species:
  • The False Spitfire Bird looks identical to the Spitfire Bird, which is able to spray a caustic acid from its nostrils at predators. This resemblance means that predators avoid the False Spitfire Bird as well.
  • The Spitfire Beetle mimics the flowers of the trees that Spitfire Birds gather their reactive chemicals from. When a Spitfire Bird arrives at the fake flower to gather more chemicals, the beetles attack and kill it.
  • The Deathbottle's top looks and reeks like a rotting fish, which attracts the Bumblebeetle. Thankfully for the bug, this one isn't lethal to them.
  • The slithersucker disguises itself as a lichen "fruit" so that it'll end up eaten by a megasquid, and then it becomes a Puppeteer Parasite that mind controls the animal to spread its chunks around.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: Justified that convergent evolution has forced new creatures into vacated niches, and so adapted into a form that resembles a now-extinct familiar animal (whether prehistoric or from the age of man). Normally, a species in this show will look like a mix between its ancestor and the species that used to fill its ecological niche in the past.
  • Snowstalker: Smilodon + polar bear + wolverine
  • Toraton: Sauropod + tortoise
  • Squibbon: Chimpanzee/gibbon + squid
  • Rainbow Squid: Giant squid + whale
  • Carakiller: Terror bird/dromaeosaurid + caracara + cassowary
  • Rattleback: Pangolin + armadillo + various scavenging rodents
  • Shagrat: Musk ox + marmot + capybara
  • Gannetwhale: Gannet + penguin + walrus
  • Cryptile Lizard: Frilled lizard + basilisk lizard
  • Megasquid: Elephant + squid
  • Spink: Naked mole rat + quail
  • Lurkfish: Electric eel + crocodile
  • Babookari: Baboon + uakari (primates forced from the trees also echo early hominids)
  • Sharkopath: Shark + lantern fish + orca
  • Deathgleaner: Desert hawk + spectral bat
  • Silver Swimmer: Fish + planktonic larval crustaceans
  • Flish: Birds + fish
  • Spitfire Bird: Bombardier beetle + hummingbird
  • Falconfly: Falcon + dragonfly
  • Scrofa: Pig + goat
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Some animals have names that are as scary as their appearance: the Sharkopath is a bioluminescent shark, the Carakiller is a flightless Feathered Fiend, and the Deathgleaner is a giant Bat Out of Hell. Also the Deathbottle, an enormous carnivorous plant, though since it can't actually move, it's more like "Names to Stay at Least Five Metres Away From at All Times".
• Nasal Weapon: The Spitfire Bird is able to spray a caustic acid from its nostrils at predators. The bird eats a certain flower to stock up on chemicals for this weapon.
• Never Grew Up: The silverswimmers evolved from larval crustaceans which gained the ability to reproduce without metamorphosing into adult form (which is known as neoteny).
• Noisy Nature: Quite annoyingly, the Snowstalker is prone to roaring loudly to announce its appearance, alerting the nesting Gannetwhales to its presence, which for obvious reasons is a terrible hunting strategy. Then there is this whole other issue of a wolverine-like mustelid somehow roaring like a tiger...
• Non-Indicative Name: Gannetwhales, being semi-terrestrial and gathering in large noisy groups on the shore to breed, are less an analogue of whales and cetaceans, and more like a seabird version of a walrus.
• No Flow in CGI: This common problem was a reason for showing so few mammals, and having them die out early on in the end, replaced by animals with smooth and shiny skin like reptiles, molluscs, arthropods, and fish. Hair is hard to animate!
• No-Sell: The Ocean Phantom is basically physically invulnerable. Being a siphonophorae colony, smashing it to tiny bits will just create new colonies springing from the parts.
• Oh, Crap!: The Rainbow squid assaulted by Sharkopaths panics when it realizes the Sharkopaths are undeterred by its Invisibility Cloak, causing it to have an Invisibility Flicker.
• Pit Trap: The Deathbottle captures prey by growing a biotic pit of poisonous spikes, with a thin membrane covering the top. When an animal of sufficient weight walks on top, it plunges through and is impaled, envenomated, and then digested, and then the membrane regrows to set the trap again.
• Planimal:
  • Garden worms have photosynthesizing algae in their body appendages, making them look like a cross between a fern and a worm. Terabytes attempt to harvest this algae by cutting out chunks of the lobes where they're stored.
  • The ocean phantom has symbiotic red algae growing on its surface which provide it and its symbiotic spindletroopers with vital carbohydrates. The ocean phantom also hunts animal prey partly to fertilize the red algae growing on it.
• Portmanteau: Boy, does this series ever love them. We have Babookaris, Bumblebeetles, Carakillers, Sharkopaths and Squibbons, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The American version condenses all 13 episodes in just one program.
• Psycho Electric Eel: The Lurkfish is a gigantic, carnivorous electric fish able to deliver shocks of up to 1200 volts (by comparison, an electric eel's shock is about 600 volts) to instantly kill or paralyze its prey.
• Punny Name: Sharkopath, Squibbon, Carakiller, Bumblebeetle, Babookari, Swampus, Flish.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The slithersucker is a relatively benign example. It's a Blob Monster which tricks the megasquid into eating it, then a small portion of it infests the brain, while the rest migrates into the cephalopod's vocal sac. The slithersucker then commands the megasquid to "sneeze" onto trees, spreading its slime far and wide, with each glob becoming a new slithersucker. The leftover portion around the brain is subsequently destroyed by the megasquid's immune system.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Completely and utterly averted. The only times it's brought up are during the Paris time lapse scene and occasional mentions of how geological processes would have long destroyed any sign of human civilization.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The rainbow squid may seem unrealistic, but it's just an exaggerated version of real bio-luminescent squid. In fact, it's probably the most realistic of all the cephalopods in the show.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The shagrats (big as sheep!) and rattlebacks.
• Rule of Cool: A lot of the predictions aren't especially plausible, but the series is as much about exploring the coolest and weirdest possible outcomes of evolution as it is about actually making serious predictions.
• Running Gag: A surprising amount of creatures are described as being three meters in size, whether it be three meters long, three meters tall, or having a three meter wingspan.
• Running on All Fours: The spink, while a bird, walks on all fours due to its subterranean lifestyle and spikes its wings into the ground with each step.
• Russian Reversal: In the 100 MYH shallow tropical sea ecosystem, ocean phantoms snatch up baby reef gliders—but adult reef gliders turn the tables by preying on ocean phantom bells and tentacles; what counts for the "Russian" part is that, in some versions, the "surveyed" location is where Moscow used to stand 100 million years prior. (The show probably meant the continental region where Moscow once stood, not the geographical spot on the globe that was its former location, since the Eurasian continent holding it would've drifted a lot in the aeons since.)
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Spindletroopers are said to grow a metre across, yet when compared to the adult reef glider — which is three metres long — only look to be a few centimetres in length. Possibly justified if the majority of 'troopers aren't fully grown.
• Sea of Sand: The Endless Desert of 200 MYH, which spans most of Pangaea II's interior. It's explicitly the largest desert that has ever existed in Earth's history.
• See the Invisible: The rainbow squid attempts to camouflage itself from the sharkopaths by turning itself the same colour as the water. It doesn't work because the sharkopaths can still detect its bioelectrical signals (and smell).
• Shock and Awe: The Lurkfish, a much larger and more threatening descendant of the electric catfish, with electric abilities similarly beefed up.
• Snowy Sabertooths: "Return of the Ice" is set in France during a glacial period, and features the snowstalker, a saber-toothed descendant of the wolverine, preying on shagrats, large herding rodents descended from lemmings.
• Speculative Biology: It's a "documentary" speculating on the possible future of life on Earth.
• Spider Swarm: One of the speculative future creatures is the Silver Spider, which has a similar eusocial caste system to ants or bees.
• Stock Sound Effect: Bear cub cries for the young Snowstalkers, vulture screeches for ocean flish.
• Super-Persistent Predator:
  • Refreshingly averted in many cases. The Snowstalker realistically flees after the Gannetwhales bombard it with their vomit, the Deathgleaners give up on attacking the baby Rattleback after its mother charges them, and the Falconfly flees after the Spitfire Bird starts squirting it with reactive chemicals. Granted, the Snowstalker does wound a Shagrat and track it down until it dies from blood loss, but this is a Real Life tactic that many predators use.
  • Played straight with the Sharkopaths, who aren't deterred by the Rainbow Squid's invisibility cloak, use their sense of electromagnetic detection to locate it, pressure it into panicking, before the school tears into it.
• Terrestrial Sea Life: Twice. 100 MYH, a species of octopus known as the Swampus has become amphibious to avoid dangerous aquatic predators such as the lurkfish, even breeding in little pools of rainwater that form inside a certain plant. They still need to submerge every once in a while to replenish oxygen and mate though. 200 MYH, a group of squids have become fully terrestrial, producing species such as the huge lumbering megasquid and the arboreal squibbons.
• Thirsty Desert:
  • The Mediterranean Salt Flats are depicted as being utterly inhospitable to all life. The only places where animals survive are the brine lakes and small islands of rock and vegetation that jut from the salt flats.
  • The cold desert of Kansas is shown even more harsh than a normal desert due to constant freezing temperatures and powerful winds from the ice age glaciers further north. Only the toughest and most specialized animals survive in this cold and barren environment, and the only reliable food can be found underground.
  • The giant interior desert which covers most of Pangaea II is uninhabitable to anything larger than a rabbit, and most animals that do live there rely on underwater reservoirs or whatever washes in from the distant sea for survival.
• Threatening Shark: 200 MY in the future and they are still there! The consulting scientists state that sharks have been able to survive and evolve throughout hundreds of millions of years simply because they're the perfect killing machines and most likely will be around for a very, very long time. In appearance they've changed very little, but they have become far more intelligent, able to pack-hunt, allowing them to easily take on even the blue whale-sized rainbow squid.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • If you're a juvenile Toraton, then walking straight into a nest of amphibious squid, with a highly venomous bite, may not be such a good idea.
  • The lost baby Scrofa, that, separated from its parents, runs out into the salt desert until it dies of heatstroke. When it was already on a safe place among the rocks, at that!
• Too Important to Walk: Every terabyte caste except the porters, which haul the other castes' members around.
• Unknown Character: The bromeliad which the swampuses breed in time their flowering at the exact time the cephalopods use their pools as nests, thereby defending the plant at its most crucial time. What animal pollinates the bromeliad is never said.
• Unspecified Apocalypse: What happened to humans is left unexplained, but apparently before we died out, there was a catastrophic ecological collapse that killed off practically all large mammals.
• Viewers Are Goldfish: The TV adaptation's 100-million-years-from-now segment explains that all mammals but one are extinct. Then the 200-million-years-from-now segment states that all mammals are extinct by then ... and goes on to list several human-era mammal types that are no longer around, just in case viewers forgot the previous segment of the program. The show also reuses the same animations over and over, often only a few minutes apart.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Literally. The Gannetwhales regurgitate and spit their last meal at possible predators while they are incubating their eggs at the shore. (The behavior is an evolved variation on how some birds, penguins in particular, regurgitate to feed their young.)
• Wham Line: "Adult toraton." To explain, the toraton is introduced as an elephant-sized herbivore descended from tortoises. It is then killed by a swampus. We then find out that it was only a baby. Adult toraton are the heaviest land animals ever, and have no predators.
• Wicked Wasp: The falconfly, despite its appearance and name, is actually a giant bird-eating wasp. Strangely, it looks more like a dragonfly, and doesn't seem to attack with its stinger, attacking instead with spear-like forelimbs and blade-like mandibles.
• Wicked Weasel: The gryken and the snowstalker are larger descendants of modern mustelids 5 MYH, turning into sabre-toothed apex predators that hunt large animals and ambush their respective prey. The snowstalker is like a miniature polar bear with huge fangs that evolved from the wolverine, while the gryken is a descendant of the pine marten that Eats Babies. They're both presented as vicious, threatening hunters, but of course they're just animals.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In a sense. Occasionally, the series introduces Fantastic Fauna Counterparts without explaining where their analogous predecessors went. For example, the Deathgleaner is a giant diurnal predaceous bat like a bird of prey, so where did birds of prey go? We know they aren't extinct, since the Carakiller is descended from one, so why aren't there any in the Kansas desert? In another case, we see that the shallow seas are inhabited by giant pelagic sea slugs, but there are no fish to be seen, even though they clearly didn't go extinct because the subsequent epoch depicts them.
• Why Won't You Die?: The Carakiller trying to attack the armoured Rattleback, but its scaly armour is just too tough to penetrate.

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