Paleoworld is a highly extensive TV Documentary series on Prehistoric Life that ran on TLC from 1994 to 1997. Season 1 (1994) was narrated by Ben Gazzara. Season 2 (1995) and Season 3 (1996) had a different narrator. For season 4 (1997), the series changed narrators again. Season 4 was canceled mid-season. TLC aired a spin-off series in 1999. It was called When Dinosaurs Ruled (Jurassica, in some countries).
A children's reboot called Bonehead: Detectives of the Paleoworld, co-hosted by All That star Danny Tamberelli, also aired in 1997. The episodes were actually pretty much the same (though there were fewer of them), but edited heavily into segments hosted by two kids. The core of the series was essentially the same, though. It aired on Discovery Kids before the network was retooled into The Hub (now Discovery Family).
See also its Science Marches On page.
This series provides examples of:
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- Saying Spinosaurus had teeth like steak knives. If your steak knife is totally conical and lacks serrations, it's time to get a new one.
- In "Carnosaurs", they claim that Carnotaurus lived before Allosaurus. While Carnotaurus was originally thought to have lived during the Mid Cretaceous (circa 100 mya) instead of the Late Cretaceous (70 mya), Allosaurus died out at the end of the Jurassic, over 145 mya.
- Despite their consultant's recommendations, the show used its puppet of Triceratops and passed it off as a rhino. This is the equivalent of an ostrich being labeled a human.
- An odd claim is made in "Carnosaurs", where the narrator says that small theropods would have been camouflaged with stripes and spots for camouflage but that camouflage "wouldn't make much difference" for a giant predator like T. rex. Actually, yes it would. Large theropods would have been slower-moving than their smaller relatives and would have greatly benefited from camouflage to sneak up on and ambush their prey.
- In "Missing Links", the narrator says that ancient humans faced off against "saber-toothed cave lions". Maybe he was trying to say "saber-tooths and cave lions" but flubbed the line?
- "Sea Monsters":
- It's mentioned that a plesiosaur could "pluck a bird from the sky". But the necks of long-necked plesiosaurs lacked the musculature or the necessary flexibility to be lifted out of the water, and were mainly used to strike at schools of fish underwater.
- Elasmosaurus is said to have stretched 60 feet with a 40-foot neck, even though it was actually under 40 feet long and had a 23-foot neck.
- Mosasaurs are said to have lived 130 million years ago, even though the only fossils of mosasaurs are found in the last 25 million years of the Cretaceous, and later finds confirmed that they only diverged from other squamates less than 95 million years ago.
- Ichthyosaurs are listed as one of the prey items for mosasaurs, even though the two groups never overlapped temporally, with ichthyosaurs dying out just before mosasaurs evolved.
- In "Killer Raptors", they say that Tenontosaurus was "one-third larger than an elephant", even though it was at most the size of a rhinoceros.
- "Mystery Of Dinosaur Cove" uses some strange terminology, describing basal ceratopsians as a "protoceratops", even though protoceratopsids (despite their name) are a derived group of ceratopsians from Late Cretaceous Asia. They also claim "struthiomimids" (ornithomimids) are only known from two sites in North America, even though the group has been found all across North America and Central Asia.
- "Valley of the Uglies" makes quite a few odd statements:
- Gastornis is said to have weighed half a ton and had a skull 3 feet long. In reality, it would have weighed less than 400 lb and the largest skull was less than 2 feet long (50 cm).
- The skull of Hyaenodon is said to resemble a crocodile's, even though it looked pretty similar to a conventional predatory mammal such as a wolf or hyena
. - They imply that entelodonts appeared sometime after Hyaenodon and possibly even outcompeted it, even though the two are well-known to have coexisted across Eurasia and North America and declined in numbers around the same time. They also imply that giant brontotheres like Megacerops appeared around the same time as Dinohyus (Late Oligocene-Early Miocene), even though the last of them vanished at the end of the Eocene.
- Forensic Drama: "Killer Raptors" becomes a parody of the genre with the fossil site treated as a crime scene.
- Land Down Under: Where Dinosaur Cove is.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: Especially not one the size of a bus.
- Raptor Attack: The episode "Killer Raptors" (as if the name didn't tip you off) focuses on Deinonychus and is usubtly riding the coattails of Jurassic Park. Besides being depicted as featherless, the episode says very little about Deinonychus and dromaeosaurs in general other than that they were ruthless and cunning killers that could punch well above their weight. The fact that Deinonychus singlehandedly kicked off the Dinosaur Renaissance and reignited interest in the long-forgotten dinosaur-bird link due to looking nigh-identical to Archaeopteryx anatomically isn't even mentioned.
- Stock Footage: Mostly in the later seasons and its Spin-Off, this was taken to ridiculous heights, most likely due to budget constraints. Instead of creating animation for each featured animal, they would often show the same few stock clips repeating. Every sauropod, every large theropod and every small bipedal dinosaur looked the same, disregarding what unique features they might have had or in the small dinosaurs' case, even whether they were meat or plant eaters. Other times, they just showed the camera wading through vegetation or looking up at trees. Another common theme was showing stiff and wooden animatronic dino-robots.
- Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: "Clash of the Titans" compares Tyrannosaurus with then-recently described Giganotosaurus, and part of it is devoted to discussing which one of them would win in a fight, with Tyrannosaurus being ultimately picked as the winner.
