Trivia / Prehistoric Predators

• Creator Provincialism: It's an American documentary that largely focuses on American fossil animals. Only partially averted with megalodon and the terror birds, as megalodon is documented from the states but also had a cosmopolitan distribution, and half of the terror bird episode focuses on the South American Kelenken, before moving on to the North American Titanis (known from Florida and Texas).
• Prop Recycling:
  • Mostly averted, but played straight with Edward's wolf and Smilodon gracilis, as they are the exact same model as the dire wolf and Smilodon fatalis from season one. Somewhat justified, as they were close relatives respectively. Likewise, the unnamed horse hunted by the Titanis is the same model as the Equus occidentalis from the La Brea episodes.
  • The small mammal that gets gobbled up by the Kelenken is very clearly just a reused Smilodon cub. One wonders why they didn't just show the Titanis eating an actual Smilodon cub?
  • The cameo by the American lion in season one is also just the Smilodon model minus the saber teeth and with a short mane.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The terror bird episode is ripe with this. Half of it is focused on Kelenken guillermoi, one of the largest terror birds and who was named the same year the series aired (2007). It also focused on the then-recent reexamination of the age of the Titanis fossils, which dispelled the old notion that it survived until 10,000 years ago.
• Science Marches On: While the show was very up-to-date for its time, some elements inevitably became outdated.
  • The short-faced bear episode has been hit particularly hard by this. It’s depicted as an obligate carnivore and a kleptoparasite who sustained itself by stealing kills from smaller predators such as saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. This interpretation was primarily based on isotope analyses done by Paul Matheus on Alaskan specimens (as shown in the episode). But based on its tooth morphology, tooth wear, and dental cavities (showing that it ate sugary plants), as well as isotope analyses done on specimens from other localities, Arctodus likely had a diet and lifestyle much more in line with extant ursids such as brown and black bears, which are opportunistic omnivores that will eat whatever is available. And much like with modern brown bears, different Arctodus simus populations likely had different dietary preferences based on what food was the most available, and given that ice age Alaska would have been a dry grassland (a biome known as the “mammoth steppe”), it makes sense that the local short-faced bears would have been more carnivorous. Much like how today’s grizzlies are known to usurp kills from gray wolves and cougars, the short-faced bear likely still stole kills from Smilodon and dire wolves when the opportunity arose, but it would not have been its only or main source of sustenance.
  • The dire wolf is depicted as a close relative of the gray wolf (Canis lupus). While commonly known as Canis dirus ever since its description in 1918, based on numerous morphological similarities between it and the gray wolf, a 2021 study which analyzed the nuclear DNA from five different dire wolf specimens revealed that the similarities were actually a case of convergent evolution, as the last common ancestor of the two lived some 5.7 million years ago and the dire wolf turned out to be a basal member of the Canina subtribe (the wolf-like canines), making it no closer to gray wolves than to coyotes, jackals, dholes and African wild dog, and it was renamed as Aenocyon dirus. With that in mind, a living dire wolf might have looked very different from a gray wolf, but on the other hand, since they evolved to fill a similar ecological niche to the Eurasian Canis lupus, dire wolves might have still borne a superficial resemblance to them. And while no DNA has been recovered from Edward’s wolf (Canis edwardii), if it was ancestral to the dire wolf, or at least part of the same North American lineage of wolf-like canines, it might also more accurately be called Aenocyon edwardii.
  • Experts are shown debating whether megalodon was a close relative of the great white shark or part of a completely separate lineage of raptorial sharks. In subsequent years, it has become the overall consensus among researchers that Otodus megalodon was the last and largest member of the extinct otodontids or mega-toothed sharks. Likewise, in contrast to the more elongated, great white-esque design shown in the episode, O. megalodon is now believed to have been stockier in build and more snub-nosed◊.
  • Only one year after the series aired, we started amassing evidence that megalodon was not the undisputed top predator of the seas, at least not during the latter half of its reign, as it competed with equally massive raptorial sperm whales such as Livyatan melvillei, known from a 10-foot skull dug up from the Peruvian Pisco Formation in 2008, and fossils of such whales (namely their enormous teeth) have subsequently been found from Chile to South Africa to Australia, showing that much like megalodon, they had a cosmopolitan distribution.
  • The extinction date of megalodon has been pushed back from 2.5 million years ago to 3.5 million years ago.
  • Entelodonts are described as close relatives of pigs, a popular notion for over a century, but later phylogenetic studies recovered them as cetancodontamorphs, a group whose only living representatives are whales and hippos.
  • As far back as 1998, some workers have synonymized Dinohyus hollandi with Daeodon shoshonensis. However, that’s not universally agreed upon, due to a lack of overlapping material, as D. shoshonensis was described from a mere jaw fragment while D. hollandi is known from nearly complete skeletons found at Agate Springs.
  • Squalodon is being increasingly viewed as a wastebasket taxon for various unrelated toothed cetaceans from the Miocene, so it's doubtful if the large species shown in the series is actually Squalodon, and not a different taxon, like, let's say, Ankylorhiza.