A stunning new animation depicts a saber-toothed cat attacking a herd of woolly mammoths in frozen northern North America towards the end of the last ice age.
The clip, which will air on Wednesday (Nov. 26) in an episode of Apple TV’s upcoming series “Prehistoric Planets: Ice Age,” explores how iconic Ice Age animals adapted to changing environments as the climate began to warm and the snow-covered world gradually disappeared. In this video, a herd of five scimitartooth cats (Homotherium serum), an extinct species of saber-toothed cat, ambushes a herd of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), including a small calf and a large adult male.
“The whole story is set in the frozen north, like Alaska and the Yukon Territory,” Mike Gunton, executive producer of the upcoming series and creative director of the BBC Studios Natural History Unit in the UK, told Live Science in an email. “Both of these creatures were like the stars of the Ice Age and were very adapted to living in the cold. This story is really about what happens when these two types of animals realize that their world is changing.”
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Toward the end of the last Ice Age about 11,500 years ago, ice sheets retreated across North America. This, as well as hunting by humans living in the Americas at the time, drove some species to extinction and reduced the population of animals that scimitartooth cats preyed on. “The prey they normally eat isn’t as close as it used to be,” Gunton said. “The lucky thing that day was that the cats spotted a herd of mammoths coming into their herd and took advantage of the opportunity to hunt them down.”
Gunton said woolly mammoths also struggled to survive at the end of the last ice age, and footage shows herds taking unusual routes across the plains in search of new feeding grounds. As shown in the video, the exposed mammoth is attacked. After a few seconds of claw-biting when the scimitar-toothed cat pounced on the male mammoth and hung from its torso by its claws, the mammoth overpowered the five cats and scared them away.
Meanwhile, the female and calf retreat, huddle together and watch the situation unfold. Researchers believe that woolly mammoth herds were female-led, with males dispersing when young, but sexually mature males sometimes joined the herd to mate, Gunton said.
“These men have what they say [musth] “They have glands on the sides of their skulls that release special pheromones that make them cry, and that excites everyone,” he said. [in the clip] This is because the males join the herd with the idea of mating with the females, and they end up spending a lot of time roaming around with them. ”
The mammoth survives the encounter, but the scimitar-toothed cat ultimately wins in a sequence later in the show, Gunton said.
“At the end of the program you see them trying again. [a] “It’s a different strategy,” Gunton said, adding that one of the cats jumped from a high rocky outcrop onto the male mammoth’s back, giving the others a chance to stack their bodies on top of each other and take it down. “And they feed,” Gunton said.
Gunton said the scimitar-toothed feline’s hunting technique in the second clip is similar to that of a leopard, which also pounces on its prey from above. Recreating these attacks was a major challenge for filmmakers. That’s because “two animals created with visual effects are actually interacting,” he said.
An even bigger challenge was making the animals look realistic, considering they were covered in fur and moving in a snowy landscape.
“Each of those creatures has millions of tiny hairs, and they all act independently and on their own,” Gunton said. “They’re doing things in the snow, so there are complex interactions between the snow itself. That’s kind of the culmination of what’s hard to do in this series.”
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