Trivia / Walking with Beasts

• Accidentally Correct Zoology: Andrewsarchus was likely included because it was believed at the time to be the largest representative of the mesonychids, and the mesonychids were believed to be the closest land-dwelling relatives of the whales. Both ideas have been disproven since then, yet Andrewsarchus was found to be a close relative of the whales after all, just in a different branch of the ungulate family tree.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A common criticism is that the show refers to the indricothere by the outdated name Indricotherium. It's actually called by a generic family name, which is still in use today. This may stem from the fact that some of the foreign dubs translate it as Indricotherium.
• California Doubling:
  • “New Dawn” takes place in Early Eocene Germany. It was shot in the jungles of Java.
  • “Whale Killer” takes place in the ancient Tethys Sea, and partially in Pakistan and Egypt, during the Late Eocene. Most of it was shot in the Florida Keys, though the Andrewsarchus and Embolotherium segment was shot in Mexico. The Florida mangroves would later be revisited for the Basilosaurus segment in Sea Monsters.
  • The forests and deserts of Arizona served as the backdrop for all of “Land of Giants”, which takes place in Late Oligocene Mongolia.
  • This even applies to the last three episodes, despite all taking place in the recent past. “Mammoth Journey” takes place in Western Europe, but it was filmed in the Yukon Territory of Canada. “Sabretooth” and “Next of Kin” were the closest to averting this, as they take place in Paraguay and Ethiopia but were shot in southern Brazil and South Africa respectively. Southern Brazil and the Yukon territory would later be revisited for “Saving the Sabretooth” and “A Mammoth Undertaking” in Prehistoric Park.
• Colbert Bump: Much like with its predecessor, outside of the already recognizable mammoths, Smilodon, ground sloth and woolly rhino, all of the other Cenozoic animals gained a major boost in fame after being featured in this series. Some of the more notable examples are Gastornis, Leptictidium, Basilosaurus, Andrewsarchus, Paraceratherium and entelodonts.
• Falsely Advertised Accuracy: Like Walking with Dinosaurs, this series was hit hard by Science Marches On, but a few things depicted in it were already wrong for its time.
  • Though not the only work paleo media to cite this misconception, the notion endorsed in “New Dawn”, that the early Cenozoic was a time dominated by giant flightless birds while mammals remained small and beholden to them is pure embellishment. Even in 2001, we already had fossils of reasonably large mammals from the Paleocene-Early Eocene like pantodonts (Barylambda, Coryphodon, Titanoides) and mesonychids (Ankalagon, Pachyaena) ^note  Ironically, the next episode shows Andrewsarchus (as a mesonychid) as an example of mammalian predators replacing Gastornis , the latter also being large predators, and while Gastornis was indeed common across Europe and North America at the time, there really isn’t much evidence of other large, flightless birds living alongside it in the Holarctic regions, while the South American terror birds and Australian dromornithids didn’t grow large until much later in the Cenozoic.
  • For some strange reason, the adapid primate Godinotia is depicted as strongly resembling a monkey (a simian) even though adapids were part of the more basal strepsirrhines, whose living representatives are lemurs, galagos, pottos, and lorises. One of its closest relatives (also from the Messel Pits) is called Europolemur for a very good reason. Even supplementary media such as Walking with Beasts: A Prehistoric Safari refers to the Messel primates as "lemur-like".
  • Even the most optimistic estimates for the fragmentary Hyaenodon gigas (the giant Asian species) placed it at half a ton (it more likely reached around 600-800 lb), nowhere close to the 6-foot-tall beast shown in "Land of Giants", which would likely weigh close to 2,000 lb (rivaling Andrewsarchus and the giant entelodonts in size). Tellingly, even the promotional images and several WWB tie-in websites show it at a more modest size.
  • The reuse of models leads to some animals not resembling their intended species.
    • The cave lion in "Mammoth Journey" being a Palette Swap of the Smilodon/Dinofelis model makes it a glaring example of this trope, as it looks like a long-tailed machairodont (even having short saber teeth) instead of a pantherine (to which lions belong to). The promotional images (also used in the tie-in books) are even worse, by giving it a short bobtail. Needless to say, even laymen know lions don't have protruding fangs and short tails.
    • Ancylotherium is depicted as being a more or less straightforward clone of Chalicotherium, with the main difference being that the former didn't walk on its knuckles. But these two taxa belonged to different subfamilies within Chalicotheriidae and thus looked far more distinct from each other, with Ancylotherium having a longer snout, a slight dome on its head (a feature that is more pronounced in the closely related Tylocephalonyx) and its front limbs weren't as disproportionally long compared to its hindlimbs, meaning it didn't have the same sloped back as Chalicotherium. Likewise, it's also described as the Last of Its Kind, but we've known about the existence of Mid Pleistocene chalicotheres in Asia since the 19th century (Nestoritherium).
• Flip-Flop of God: The series website identified the small nocturnal carnivore from "New Dawn" as a miacid, but the book Walking with Beasts: A Prehistoric Safari and (allegedly) Prehistoric Planet claim it is a creodont. It should be noted that the books and Prehistoric Planet describe scenes in different enough terms to be considered an Alternate Continuity, however.
• Market-Based Title: In North America, the name of the documentary was slightly changed to Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Propalaeotherium in "New Dawn" seems to have been a lead-up to a horse species in "Sabre Tooth", shown only in a single promotional image, to depict equid evolution, although it ended up cut in the actual episode.
  • The mention of hyenas and the hyena laughs in "Mammoth Journey", if it is indeed result of a Deleted Role and not a Genius Bonus.
• Prop Recycling:
  • Most obvious for the small carnivore from "New Dawn", as it's just the bear-dog model from "Land of Giants", downsized to fit in the Ambulocetus' jaws. Unlike the other examples, it didn't even receive a Palette Swap.
  • The Chalicotherium and Ancylotherium are also the same model, but with modified front feet for the latter.
  • Threefold example with the big cats, as Smilodon, Dinofelis, and the cave lion all share the same base model with minor modifications for the latter two respectively. It explains why the cave lion doesn't look much like a cave lion.
  • Surprisingly, the mammoth prop was not created for the show. It originally came from another Discovery Channel production called Land of the Mammoth, which came out several months before Walking with Beasts. To go along with this trend, both the mammoth prop and Smilodon prop as featured in Beasts would later be reused in Monsters We Met
• Re-Cut:
  • The American Discovery Channel version which, in addition to alternative narration, was cut to make room for commercial breaks.
  • Prehistoric Planet (not to be confused with the 2022 series): another Discovery Channel version, this time aimed specifically at children.
  • A 90-minute Compilation Movie, which is used on the Reader's Digest DVD of the series.
• Referenced by...: Leppy the Lepictidium from Jimmy Neutron shares the color scheme of the series' portrayal of it.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Most of the featured animals have been known for many decades (at least) prior to the Turn of the Millennium (some as far back as the 19th century), but Ambulocetus was only described in 1994 and was seen as a major "missing link" in cetacean evolution, hence why one shows up in "New Dawn", despite having lived nowhere near Germany.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally Walking With Beasts was going to air first (the idea being that the trilogy would be moving backwards through time), but they only received enough money for a show about dinosaurs, and they made Walking With Dinosaurs.
  • Among the proposed episode ideas for Walking With Beasts was one based around the Riversleigh fossil site from Australia. Such an episode could have featured diprotodonts, thylacines, a Gastornis-like bird (Bullockornis), running crocodiles and a python (since then included into Morelia, but hard to believe they would pass the chance to drop the original name Montypythonoides). They chose to abandon it, as they already had enough stories planned.
  • Several promo images show the cave lion with the Smilodon's short, bobcat-like tail. It was given a longer, more panther-like tail in the final product, but not much else was done to tweak the model.
  • The larger feathers on the back of the Gastornis's head were added late into production and there is official art both with them, and without.
  • There is plenty of promotional art with male Smilodon, including Half Tooth (the one with a broken fang), that don't have lion-like manes. It seems the manes were included very late in development.
  • At least two different promo pics of Phorusrhacos testing Doedicurus, while in the show they never interact. And a tie-in book-only arc and picture of Phorusrhacos hunting and eating a horse (apparently replaced in the show by Phorusrhacos hunting a young Macrauchenia).

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