Surviving Earth Docuseries Mass Extinction

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Almost three decades have passed since producer Tim Haines reimagined natural history with Walking with Dinosaurs, using CGI and animatronics to bring to life the beasts that roamed these lands millions of years ago.

With his latest project, Haines is applying that same visual magic to look even further into the past. Surviving Earth, a docuseries premiering on Thursday on NBC, explores eight mass extinction events going back 450m years through the lives – and eventual annihilation – of the creatures that preceded or existed alongside the dinosaurs.

But what is essentially a series on death is actually a series on life, or really, the resilience of it – “how life bounced back” from the volcanic eruptions, flooding and drought that have repeatedly wiped out nearly all lifeforms, Haines told the Guardian.

“The biggest message of the show is that the Earth is an incredibly changeable place and life has evolved on it, which means that life has evolved to cope with change,” Haines said. “No matter what the Earth has tried to do, life has always managed to crawl through it and come out the other side stronger.”

Haines worked with more than 300 scientists to breathe life into the creatures in Surviving Earth, consulting with paleontologists and paleoclimatologists from around the world over the course of three and a half years. While CGI technology and the visual details of CGI animation are better now than they were in 1999, when Walking with Dinosaurs premiered on the BBC, the process of putting the series together was not too different, Haines said. A paleo artist designed the animals while film crews determined the locations to shoot the backgrounds, some of which, like a forest in Chile with monkey puzzle trees, Haines had used in Walking with Dinosaurs. The tech team then built landscapes based on the background shots and detailed models of the animals off of the paleo artist’s designs before animating the creatures and compositing everything together.

There will always be some level of debate over what the fossils and paleological discoveries of past centuries tell us about prehistoric life – what these animals looked like, how they moved and what they ate – and because no one alive has witnessed these animals, their renderings will always be “what the scientists think is the best guess”, Haines said. “We never know when we’re right, but we know when we’re wrong.”

For example, the gorgonopsians of the first episode are reptilian apex predators who are also the early distant relatives of mammals. “They’re kind of half mammal, half reptile, and we had a huge discussion about whether there should be any hair on them,” Haines said. “I really wanted them to have whiskers.” Haines was ultimately overruled by a scientist who described them as the “really” early distant relatives of mammals and in the first episode, they appear similar to modern-day Komodo dragons.

With any nature program, showrunners have to find a way to endear to the human audience to animals that cannot verbally communicate with them, but stopping just short of anthropomorphization. “We want you to emotionally connect to their stories, but we don’t want to start calling them Eric and Sonia,” Haines said. An added challenge that Haines faces this time around is that while the least paleontologically inclined layperson is somewhat familiar with dinosaurs, it is unlikely that they have even heard of the creatures featured in Surviving Earth.

But a good narrative can cross any barrier. “The storytelling we’re using is universal,” Haines said. “It is parents and babies, it is fathers and mothers, predators and prey … they are creatures living their lives, and what natural history shows you is that you can get some very rich stories out of that.”

The first episode ends by addressing the prehistoric mastodon in the room – that given the current climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine we’re in the midst of an imminent extinction event as well. To borrow a phrase from another blockbuster franchise about prehistoric creatures, Surviving Earth’s overall message of optimism is that life finds a way. That message feels a bit more daunting when you realize that this does not mean you and your species will survive. Scientists estimate that something like 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct and humans could go the same way too.

But as narrator Josh Goodman points out in the first episode, over scenes of cars, cities and modern life, today’s levels of carbon dioxide, the primary driver of mass extinctions, are not high when compared with the history of life on Earth – which means that human beings aren’t the only species to have caused the climate crisis. “Other types of life have changed the Earth as well,” Haines said. “As a form of life, we’re not the first ones to change the climate, but we are the first ones who know we’re doing it.”

The concern lies in the speed at which humans are driving the climate crisis. But as the first species to be aware of such, Haines said, humans also have the unique opportunity to be the first species to stop the damage and find a way to make the Earth continue to be inhabitable for them.

“The program isn’t here to lecture anyone or tell anyone what to do, but it’s blindingly obvious that if the Earth changes, you have to acknowledge that and change with it as much as you can,” Haines said. “And if you’re responsible for changing it, you’d be wise to try and reduce the amount you change it by.”