The team behind Apple TV+’s groundbreaking natural history series Prehistoric Planet have revealed they hope to be able to return with future episodes following the first five part-instalment.
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com at the BFI & Radio Times Television Festival, producer Mike Gunton, series producer/showrunner Tim Walker, and lead scientific consultant Darren Naish all outlined what might lie in store in the future.
“I think the answer to that is this is a Planet Earth format,” Gunton explained. “There are five habitats [explored in the first season] and there are a lot more habitats on planet Earth than just five. And there’s this incredibly rich fauna of creatures, we’ve only touched the surface. So read into that.”
“I’ll add in as well that like Mike says there’s a lot of different habitats to explore,” Walker added. “Prehistoric Planet as a whole was a big place, you know, and the period of dinosaurs and prehistoric life that we show is a very, very small one – we only show about 6 million years of the whole evolution period and it extends almost 160 million.”
“We all desperately want to get in that time machine and go back and see what else is out there,” said Gunton. “So yeah, we’re gonna do it if we can.”
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Asked if there was anything particular – in terms of species or specific time periods – that he’d like to see in future seasons, Naish said it was hard to single anything out.
“There’s so many,” he said. “I mean, my comments will echo what my colleagues have said, even for specific species we’ve probably only shown a tiny portion of their lives.
“We’ve shown the T-Rex doing two or three things, and it did so many other things in its life. And then there are all these other species. So even just for the Maastrichtian, just for that last 6 million years of the late Cretaceous, we’ve scratched the surface.”
Our panel, Executive Producer Mike Gunton, Producer Tim Walker and Lead Scientific Consultant Darren Naish, answer all the audience’s dinosaur-related questions. #TVFest pic.twitter.com/wAwFLzFu9Y
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“And another thing to say is he’s discovering new stuff,” Gunton added. “So there are things out there that we haven’t even seen yet.
“So you know, we’re desperate to go and… when you’re a wildlife filmmaker, the pressure for contemporary stuff is, where are the most recent discoveries? And it’s exactly the same here. But the joy of this is if you find something, we know nobody else has ever seen it before.”
Naish revealed: “I’ve got a new dinosaur coming out next week!”
Prehistoric Planet airs across five nights on Apple TV+ from Monday 23rd May. Find out how to sign up for Apple TV+ here or find something to watch with our TV Guide.
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