Nightmare Fuel / Prehistoric Planet

As this is a Nightmare Fuel page, spoilers will be left unmarked.

Children. It's what's for dinner.

Season One

• From Coasts:
  • Boy, is Improbable Infant Survival averted. The series makes it starkly clear that Cretaceous life is perilous for any young animal, and hatchlings of dinosaurs and pterosaurs alike fall prey to hunters by the dozens.
  • The Mosasaurus devouring a baby T. rex. The most disturbing part is how the baby just disappears under the water, and never comes back up, confirming his death.
  • The Jump Scare when the old Mosasaurus is attacked by his younger rival. The fight that follows is quite a tense moment, with the two giant lizards trying to drown each other.
  • The Barbaridactylus hunting the baby Alciones. They even get most of them. Also, the fact that the scene takes place at dusk means that the Barbaridactylus are almost completely silhouetted during the whole chase.
  • The Phosphatodraco isn’t any less deadly than the Barbaridactylus and effortlessly makes a meal out of a baby pterosaur, which can be heard screaming all the while.
  • The Kaikaifilu for the same reason as the other mosasaurs.

• From Deserts:
  • The Dreadnoughtus battle. Never before in the history of dinosaur media has Gentle Giant Sauropod been averted so horrifically. Instead of the more familiar peaceful browser sauropods are usually known as, the Dreadnoughtus males are shown every bit as vicious as hippos or elephant seals, literally fighting each other to the death as they bite each other's throats, stab each other with their thumb claws, and slam into each other with such force that the loser is literally crushed to death by their own weight.
  • Though also a little funny, it is definitely a tense moment when the Tarbosaurus wakes up and snaps at the Velociraptor.
    • Though the raptor itself and the pterosaurs can also be quite intimidating, since we see them through the eyes of a lizard. Suddenly the coyote-sized predator looks positively gigantic.
  • The death of the aspirant male Barbaridactylus is probably one of the most violent deaths shown in the documentary. To put it into perspective, after an aerial escape, the dominant male that was chasing him hits him, making the aspirant unable to fly, after which he crashes against the plateau and falls, his body hitting the ground, lifeless.

• From Freshwater:
  • The rival Quetzalcoatlus eating the “main” one’s eggs, complete with bloody red yolk dripping from one of said eggs when she crushes it in her beak.
  • The Beelzebufo. A frog of all things would be the last thing you'd expect to eat a dinosaur, a baby one, sure, but a dinosaur nonetheless.

• From Ice Worlds:
  • The dromaeosaur ambush, leading to a tense moment where a baby hadrosaur is knocked into the river and almost drowns. While the calf survives, another isn’t so lucky, and its dead body ends up as a meal for the dromaeosaurs.
  • The mosquitos who plague the Olorotitan herd. For the adults, they’re a mere nuisance, but for the newly hatched babies, they’re deadly—threatening to more or less drain them of all their blood. And what’s worse, the babies who are too weak from blood loss are quickly and unhesitatingly abandoned by their parents, who seem largely apathetic to their offspring’s plight. A very clear case of Nature Is Not Nice.
  • The troodontid spreading a forest fire to lure out small mammals as prey.

• From Forests:
  • The baby Triceratops getting trapped in the caves, with one wrong move being the difference between life and death; not only is he separated from his herd, but the poisonous plants he had just eaten would likely kill him if he didn’t get to the clay deposits on time.
  • The build up to the Hatzegopteryx’s entrance; a crèche of baby Zalmoxes are wandering through the forests and suddenly sense something coming. Frantically, they try to scurry away, when a massive beak appears out of nowhere and grabs one of them, the giant pterosaur swallowing its prey alive shortly after.

Season Two

• From Islands:
  • The Hatzegopteryx hunting sequence is framed like a horror film, with several shots filmed from the point of view of the young Tethyshadros being hunted as they stare up from beneath the undergrowth at the giraffe-sized predatory azhdarchids. The Uncovered segment puts even greater emphasis on the fact that Hatzegopteryx, and the other giant azhdarchids, were quite capable of consuming human-sized prey items... They might well have been able to take even bigger prey, since they only focus on the young Tethyshadros after the adults manage to hide in a forest. As the Hatzegopteryx descend, the adult Tethyshadros - roughly the size of horses - can do nothing but run for their lives.
    • A rather subtle moment from that sequence — upon remembering that she's been separated from her young, a mother Tethyshadros calls out to them. It promptly cuts to one of the Hatzegopteryx, clearly putting two and two together and turning its attention to the tall pine saplings in which the young are hiding...
    • There's also the fact that the Hatzegopteryx immediately start galloping upon landing on the ground, meaning it can land and chase its prey in a matter of seconds. Despite its awkward appearance, it's actually very nearly as fast as the adult Tethyshadros, who only barely make it to the shelter of the trees in time.
• From Badlands:
  • The perils the baby Isisaurus go through when traveling away from the volcanoes their mothers laid their eggs in. Not only do they have to evade predators like Rajasaurus, but some of them fall into deadly traps of volcanic liquid as well. The one we see getting stuck in said traps desperately cries out to its brethren, to no avail, and is simply left to its fate.
• From Swamps:
  • The Shamosuchus hunting the baby azdarchids at the start of the episode.
  • After a season of displaying T. rex as a doting parent or a loving couple, the ending of the episode serves as a reminder of why they were the most terrifying predators that ever walked on the planet. When night falls on their territory, a pair of T. rex circle around the few Edmontosaurus still grazing for food, their large eyes adapted to night vision and their heavy footsteps being muffled by their padded feet. Once both are positioned, one of the T. rex deliberately cracks a branch to send the Edmontosaurus into a state of panic before lunging for the nearest one. The terrified Edmontosaurus ends up running into the second T. rex and it isn't long before the two predators start clamping their bone-crushing jaws onto the poor hadrosaur, ending the hunt in mere minutes.
    • This is also a rare case where averting typical pop-culture stereotypes about dinosaurs serves to make the subjects even scarier. Unlike the usual perpetually-shrieking monster that shakes the earth with every step, you'll never see or hear this Stealthy Colossus coming until it's too late.
• From Oceans:
  • The Xiphactinus. Already scary enough on their own due to their Nightmare Faces (something the real animal is known to have) but they get really scary when they get dissatisfied with the fish in the bait ball and start hunting the Hesperornis. And each other.
  • The Mosasaurus launching out of the water at top speed to eat a Tuarangisaurus. The impact alone manages to kill the poor thing. The Uncovered segment of this episode even notes that if a Mosasaurus had its sights on you, a mix of its speed and strength would mean you'd basically be doomed no matter what.

From Series as a Whole

• The sheer number of times carnivores Eats Babies. Just when you thought it was done, it just keeps happening.
  • For viewers more used to the fantastical, trope common portrayals of prehistoric life often aimed at kids with certain tropes used to keep the rating safe, it can be very jarring.
  • Potentially adding to the eeriness is the acts are not portrayed as vile deeds done by villains, just normal happenings in the natural world by animals no more evil than a herbivore. Even documentaries showcasing real-life predation often shy away from showing this little-spoken-of aspect of nature were a majority of offspring don't live to see adulthood.
  • Though it may also act as Nightmare Retardant to see the predators not portrayed as villains for once, and even portrayed sympathetically. They aren't cartoonishly murderous killers, and are simply trying to survive.
• The realistic pterosaurs can be a major case of Unintentional Uncanny Valley due to their almost bird-like appearances, but with heads almost too big for their bodies, long lanky limbs and strange, oddly-ungulate-like quadruped gait can make them very uncomfortable to look at at times. Special mention goes to the Phosphatodraco from episode one, with the visuals really emphasizing how eerily lanky he is, on top of his status as a baby eater. ^note Though this mostly applies when they’re on the ground—in flight, they’re truly magnificent.
  • There's also the fact that unlike many other documentaries, the pterosaurs depicted in the documentary actually fold their wing membranes on themselves when grounded, showing their unnaturally skinny limbs in full display, making their movement look almost something like you expect from an alien in science fiction.
  • Even creepier? This is almost exactly how pterosaurs probably looked in real life. It's downright eerie to imagine that these bizarre-looking creatures are what actually roamed the earth millions of years ago, as opposed to the more comfortingly familiar bird- or batlike depictions we're used to.

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