Imagine Jurassic Park only without the ensuing havoc of a saboteur shutting off the power and raptors hunting everyone down. Also, instead of cloning dinosaurs from DNA, the park’s extinct animals were saved from extinction via a time portal. Oh, and instead of housing dinosaurs in a theme park-like environment, this “park” is more of an animal sanctuary open to accommodating any manner of extinct creature.
Welcome to Prehistoric Park.
Unlike a so-so Spielberg thriller, Prehistoric Park is a wonderfully imaginative and engrossing television mini-series. It stars Nigel Marven, a British naturalist who travels back in time in each episode to rescue animals on the brink of extinction. His Prehistoric Park is an in-progress compound designed to breed and care for these animals that evolution gave up on.
In the first episode, Nigel sets out to retrieve an absolute showstopper--the most famous, or infamous, dinosaur of all--a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Traveling through the mysterious time portal, he arrives shortly before the giant meteor that extinguishes all dinosaur life on earth. There he stalks a wounded T-Rex but ends up bringing back more than just the king of “thunder lizards.”
One of the neatest aspects of Prehistoric Park is that the show doesn’t just focus on dinosaurs alone; there’s an intriguing variety to the types of animals and time periods visited, as the second episode moves past dinosaurs and finds Nigel heading to the end of the Ice Age to rescue a Wooly Mammoth. But dinosaurs aren’t totally forgotten as the show continually flashes back to “present day” at the Park where the staff there must deal with the creatures Nigel’s already brought back, like a herd of Omithomimus that won’t settle in their new habitat or an antsy teenage Triceratops they’ve named Theo.
Keeping things different again in the third episode, Nigel heads to prehistoric China to seek out more dinosaurs, only this time they’re ones few of us have probably heard of before. They’re tiny, feathered, four-winged, flying dinosaurs called microraptors. But the hunt for these tiny dinos also reveals the largest creatures Prehistoric Park will come to host, along with a very unwelcoming volcano that causes trouble for Nigel and his crew.
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