Returned to "Prehistoric Planet," this time with trees on my mind. The series remains confounding in its uncanny recreation of nature documentary stories and angles in a CGI reconstruction of the late Cretaceous - 66 million years ago. Binge-watching all five episodes of the first season and the first of the new, second season has left me sated and a little sickened at the pervasive anthropomorphism.But - as is often the case for human historical dramas - the settings are not CGI. There are plenty of trees, many of whose species had evolved to something like their forms today long before the age of dinosaurs. (Angiosperms and palms spread in the early Cretaceous; conifers and tree ferns and ginkgos are even older.) So the forest where the 80-foot-tall Austroposeidon appear above is a real forest, likewise that around the Hatzegopteryx below. Different areas had different climates than now, needless to say but the availability of similar enough climates somewhere on the planet today offers a different uncanniness. Trees have a vastly longer species history than we do.
