Ice Age Giants (2013) s01e01 Episode Script
Land Of The Sabre-Tooth
Two and a half million years ago, life on Planet Earth faced the dawn of a new era .
.
the Ice Age.
Now we can go back in time .
.
because out of the permafrost, from deep inside caves, and from hostile deserts, the astonishing remains of giant animals are emerging.
How amazing to be one of the first people to see this ancient creature.
The Ice Age was the last time such creatures would walk the Earth.
A lost Eden with mammoths taller than any elephant, cats with seven-inch teeth, and some of the strangest beasts that have ever existed.
I'm fascinated by what the remains of ancient animals can tell us about THEM, and the world they lived in.
Using new scientific advances, we can reveal how they lived, and why they died out.
Come with me, back to the Ice Age.
A world ruled by giants! The Great Ice Age was triggered by a combination of natural forces acting on a colossal scale.
Continents moved.
The planet shifted in its orbit.
Earth was battered by a merciless cycle of freeze and thaw.
The last freeze started around 80,000 years ago.
A vast ice sheet marched down from the Arctic, across a continent that today we call North America.
Known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, it wiped out everything in its path.
It advanced down over the continent, and life retreated before it.
No animals or plants could survive on its endless icy plains.
It might seem like a catastrophe, but beyond the ice, incredibly, the continent saw an explosion of life .
.
making America the best place in the world to discover long-lost giants.
I'm going south of where the ice sheet once lay, searching for megafauna - the great beasts of the Ice Age.
Where else would you go for an encounter with the ultimate Ice Age celebrity? This is the territory of one of the most iconic and terrifying animals of the Ice Age.
This is Los Angeles.
A place with a surprisingly deep past.
This glittering city, today the home of movie stars and billionaires is also a portal to a lost world.
Here, we can step back in time and meet this awesome creature face to face.
Smilodon fatalis, a sabre-tooth cat, surveys her territory CAT GROWLS .
.
some of the richest hunting grounds in the Ice Age world.
CAT ROARS There is something primal and nightmarish about these teeth.
But exactly how they were used has been a mystery.
You can't help but be impressed by this fantastic skull and these formidable teeth, but this construction presented Smilodon with a problem.
These teeth are so long and thin that they're actually very vulnerable.
If they were to get stuck in the sinews or the bone of a violently struggling animal, there's a real danger they could snap.
It's certainly not a problem faced by any large predator today.
The big cats of the African plains kill large prey by suffocation.
Either by smothering .
.
or by crushing the windpipe.
Remarkably, the canines of a lion rarely even break the skin.
But Smilodon could not have killed in this way.
Blaire Van Valkenburgh has spent decades puzzling it out.
Her evidence points to a method of killing unique to sabre-tooth cats.
Their teeth were used for stabbing.
What we THINK is that they went for the throat because there is a lot of structures in there that make you quite vulnerable, such as your windpipe, or jugular vein or carotid arteries, these mass of arteries that feed blood to the brain.
But Blaire needed to figure out how a sabre-tooth cat could safely deliver this stabbing death blow.
How does its skull compare with other big cats? A CT scan reveals that the temporal bone, where the jaw joins the skull is incredibly thick in a sabre-tooth cat, much thicker than in a lion or a cheetah.
That means a chillingly powerful bite and massive jaw muscles.
To land that lethal bite, their mouths could open wide, twice as wide as any lion.
With these canines, they could drive these two things together and then pull backwards .
.
and take out a large amount of flesh .
.
making the animal probably bleed to death within minutes.
A brutal technique that few animals could defend against.
An American horse.
To despatch it, this cat must go in hard and kill quickly.
It's at the moment of the kill that the cat's teeth are at their most vulnerable.
The secret to protecting them lies in its bones.
Usually what we see in association with having big canine teeth like that in these kinds of sabre-toothed species is their sort of over-muscled forelimbs.
They have very heavy, strong forelimbs, like wrestlers.
And pig paws, too.
Their paws are enlarged with big dewclaws, here and then they could grasp the prey and hold it steady, one paw holding the head, one holding the body, and then apply this killing bite, just where they need to put it and thereby minimise the risk to themselves of breaking those teeth.
With these incredibly powerful forelimbs, it would pull down its prey before dispatching it with these terrifying teeth.
PREY NEIGHS CAT ROARS Everything about a sabre-toothed cat, its teeth, its killing technique and its muscular body, point to one thing - this predator was designed to hunt large prey.
During the Ice Age, sabre-tooth cats flourished right across the continent.
So America must been full of large animals for them to hunt.
My next giant may not be as famous as its sabre-toothed predator but for me, it's even more extraordinary.
It inhabited the most spectacular part of America.
I'm looking for Ice Age secrets in the desert landscape of the Grand Canyon.
This creature left behind something far more revealing than just its teeth and bones.
Hidden somewhere high up amongst these towering walls and spires is its lair.
Thank you! Nothrotheriops shastensis - the Shasta ground sloth.
As large as a grizzly bear.
She walks on the sides of her feet, ponderous as she browses.
But she has seven-inch-long claws.
Too dangerous - even for a sabre-tooth.
THEY ROAR With such a huge body to feed, she isn't really what you'd expect to find in a desert.
Jim Mead is a world expert in ground sloths.
He'll help me track it down.
Today, in the Grand Canyon, a lot of the plants here are either poisonous or, like this jumping cholla cactus, covered in vicious spines.
The hideous spines of the barrel cactus were even used by the Aztecs for sacrificing victims.
A clue as to how the ground sloth survived here lies within its lair.
To find it, we have to retrace the animal's journey, right up into the high canyon walls.
Are we nearly there yet, Jim? A long way! As our eyes adjust to the gloom of the cave, I can't quite believe what I'm seeing.
So Jim - what is this, is this what it looks like? This is just a pile of dung of a Shasta ground sloth, an extinct animal of the Ice Age, and we have a whole pile of it here.
I just find it utterly unbelievable that this ancient animal's faeces are still here.
I mean, that looks like a piece of relatively fresh dung which has just been dried out.
Why on earth hasn't it rotted away? There's no water.
It's a totally dry cave.
And so without the water, you don't get the decay to mumify it.
And it's preserved, and it's preserving a very unique record of this animal.
You can see all these definite twigs.
It's not a good digester.
It's doing a very poor job of digesting, which is wonderful for us, cos here's the data.
It's incredible to be holding the remains of a meal, eaten by this giant animal, during the Ice Age.
The dung reveals that the sloth's menu was richer than what's on offer today.
There were also juniper and single-leaf ash trees growing here.
But it's still a big challenge for any digestive system.
A clue as to how the ground sloth survived lies with its relatives - the ones that didn't go extinct.
A tree sloth.
She lives high up in the canopy of the South American rainforest .
.
dining on tough and toxic leaves.
It will take her weeks to digest them, and for precious little energy .
.
which is why sloths are so terribly slow.
The ground sloths of the Ice Age were adapted for THEIR strange diets, too.
If you could peer inside a ground sloth, you'd see a huge fermenting gut.
A Shasta ground sloth was basically a compost heap on legs.
It could digest pretty much anything.
The downside was a sluggish metabolism, just like sloths today.
But the sloth's dung tells us a lot more than just what it ate.
It's also a record of one species's struggle for survival during the Ice Age.
So, all of this that looks like sediment is in fact excrement? This is all dung, this is all dry preserved dung and what you're seeing is the surface here, it's probably dating on the neighbourhood of 20,000 and you're seeing going back through time down into different layers, further and further.
We've obviously got some other animals here as well as ground sloths, there are tiny little pellets here, too.
So what are those? These little pellets would be pack rats, little rodents.
They're also scurrying around in here.
And yeah, we'll find a little bit of that.
But most of this stuff, most of this material, that is still Shasta ground sloth dung? 99% is Shasta ground sloth right here.
You get this pungent smell, and curiously, it's like a wine.
The sweeter it is, it's older.
This is old.
Just by the smell, it's old.
Do you ever think you've seen or smelled too much dung? Never! This is wonderful.
At the back of the cave, the dung really piles up.
And it's here that the beginning and the end of the Shasta ground sloth's story is written.
- So this is where we're starting to get deeper and deeper.
- Oh, yeah! - More and more time.
- It's really building up here.
- Yeah.
It's all through here.
Now this is the profile I really want to show you.
- This is incredibly deep at this point.
- Yeah.
What we have is a metre and a half of almost pure Shasta ground sloth dung.
If we look at the bottom of the unit, so we're looking at about, oh, say 40,000 years ago, the sloth dung is kind of telling us this is a good time to be in the Grand Canyon.
Then when we get to THIS point right in here, now we're at 23,000 years old and something is happening.
Oh, so this has changed completely.
Now we're down into what looks like these little pellets.
Is this the pack rats again? Yeah, all pack rat midden and different plants.
And then this is about 16,000 years old.
These dates are really significant because this means we are looking at the peak of the last Ice Age and it seems that for some reason, ground sloths aren't here at that time.
That's precisely it, something is going on during the full glacial.
As the ice reached its maximum extent, ground sloths abandoned the Grand Canyon.
It was too dry for their favourite plants.
And the drop in temperature didn't help.
Sloths, with their slow metabolism, would have struggled to keep warm.
It's easy to imagine chaos as the Ice Age really began to bite, with those giant ice sheets descending over half the continent.
But although the sloth suffered, other giants thrived during the Ice Age .
.
none more so than one that used to stalk the badlands of Arizona.
Back in the Ice Age, not everywhere was cold and dry.
Large swathes of Arizona were covered in swamp .
.
home to an Ice Age giant that is possibly the weirdest mammal ever.
So weird that scientists can't even agree quite what it looked like.
A team from Arizona's Museum of Natural History has just found an impressive new specimen.
The surrounding soil has been dug away and the creature, encased in plaster, ready to be moved.
Dave Gillette is obsessed with these animals.
Dave, what are these creatures? These are animals called glyptodonts.
They're known for their rigid shell.
It's quite strange looking at it like this, all covered in plaster.
How big is the specimen inside that? Oh, it occupies almost the entire contents, as far as we can tell.
Right, so this is a large creature? Yes, and it's an upside-down shell so that it's belly up, so to speak.
Strangely, most of the glyptodonts Dave has discovered have been found upside down.
I can't wait to see what these creatures were like.
But first, Dave must solve the puzzle of how to get this one out of the ground.
This is all really exciting.
We're going to more the A-frame out of the way and the glytptodont can start its journey.
It's been here for two million years and it's just about to go on its travels.
The only thing holding this two-ton lump of fossil and earth together is the fragile coat of plaster.
Do you think that the weight is OK, just on these four-by-fours? All right.
Whoo! - I feel like - oh, happy day! - Yeah.
Goodbye, glyptodont! SHE LAUGHS This find will join the world's greatest collection of glyptodonts at the museum in Mesa.
Dave pieces together these specimens to get a better picture of this bizarre creature.
Ah, Dave, these are fantastic! Are they all from Arizona as well? These are all from same area where we just finished excavating.
Is this a hand or a foot we're looking at here? These are probably digging feet.
We think that glyptodonts had a very strong digging motion.
That's wonderful.
What's this - is this a tail? This is a tail.
- Each vertebra was protected by bony plates all the way around.
- Yeah.
And in fact the tail could be a weapon.
It's incredibly chunky, isn't it? It's amazing, yeah.
And this is a vertebra.
This is really odd.
It's so peculiar, cos I'm seeing bits of anatomy that I kind of recognise but it all seems to be a bit twisted.
It's all very strange-looking to me.
But it's still a mammal, so you can still recognise it as a mammal, even if it is strange.
A very weird mammal.
A very weird mammal.
So put all the bits together, and what have you got? A bony shell with a belly that was covered in soft fur.
An armoured tail and formidable claws.
Just one crucial bit missing.
What would the face of this glyptodont have looked like? Well, the face would have been very cheeky, fat on the side.
The trunk would have extended from the nasal bones and extended for a foot or more.
It had a trunk? I think it had a trunk.
There's a lot of debate about that but I don't see any other feeding mechanism for glyptodonts.
And do you think the bony arrangement that we can see here looks like it would have supported a trunk as well? I think it does.
I see muscle scars on the front of these descending processes.
That's great.
I mean, - those are muscles which - in us - make us smile.
- That's right.
But in the glyptodont, they're about moving its trunk around.
Well, maybe they could smile a little, too! THEY LAUGH It's by far the oddest mammal I've ever seen.
More like some sort of mythological creature, like an enormous armadillo with a trunk! Even its teeth are peculiar.
Look at its jaw - that's wonderful! This is spectacular.
This is the left jaw, and these are the teeth.
You see, there are eight teeth - all cheek teeth, no canines and no incisors.
Oh, right.
Yeah, and each tooth has three lobes.
You can see there are grooves on the teeth and the ridges.
So what were they eating with these teeth? Well, they were eating soft vegetation around the streams and lakes.
These strange Christmas-tree-shaped teeth were made to chew on aquatic plants.
Dave has found another unusual creature alongside the glyptodont.
The capybara .
.
a giant rodent that still lives in the tropical swamps of South America.
And in the Ice Age, it shared the Arizonan swamp with glyptodonts.
So could they swim? I'm sure they could swim.
I'm sure they could swim with other glyptodonts and capybaras and other animals in the water.
Unlike its furry neighbour, this glyptodont is a challenge for any predator.
Slow-moving perhaps, but armoured like a tank.
A stand-off between two males.
Each one is a ton of muscle and solid bone.
THEY SCREECH Vanquished, the loser struggles to right himself.
If a glyptodont died in the water, its bloated body would turn belly-up and eventually sink down to the river bed .
.
which could explain why so many are found upside down.
So what turned the deserts into swamp? The answer lies with the impact the Great Ice Age had on the world.
Over the last two and a half million years, there has been not just one Ice Age, but around 20 of them.
Fossils reveal that every time the ice sheet grew, the Arizonan marshes expanded and the number of glyptodonts rose.
And when the ice shrank, their numbers fell.
The ice sheet was acting like a vast mountain range, two miles high, big enough to divert moisture-laden Pacific winds, pushing them south THUNDERCLAPS .
.
watering the desert and turning it into a lush wetland paradise.
Across the continent, the Ice Age created new worlds for other giants to exploit.
And there's one animal in particular that benefited.
The greatest giant of them all.
Hidden in the sea mist, on a coastal plain just north of San Francisco, some large rocks stand tall .
.
sentinels that still bear witness to the wanderings of an Ice Age leviathan.
State archaeologist Breck Parkman has spent decades examining every square inch of these rocks.
- Look at this.
- It's polished.
- It is polished.
- What do you think caused it - is it weathering? No, actually, I think this is all from animals.
Every bit of this is from animals.
Large mammals often need a good scratch, perhaps to dislodge unwanted guests, like ticks.
Breck believes that over a long period of time animals have polished these rocks to a shine.
Have you tested this hypothesis? I have.
We've worked in the lab, and we have taken samples of rocks that were known to be polished by wind and by water and by faulting and it doesn't compare.
We've actually looked at something like three or four dozen other ideas, some of which are crazy, you know - what happens when kelp moves against the rocks, what happens with guano on the rocks, and what happens here - and you have to see it, though, and you're seeing it today - you have to see it to see the selectivity.
Where is the polish and where isn't it? And it's these knobs and overhangs - it's up to a certain height and doesn't go higher.
Some surfaces have been worn mirror-smooth.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's a massive area of polish.
But there's one very revealing bit of polishing.
Wait until you see this rock! So what have we got here? Well, we have more polish.
But look at this.
Look at how high this polish is.
Oh, yeah! That's a bit too high for a sheep.
And look at this.
This is just the beginning.
this polish goes right on up, right on up as high as I can reach.
This is close to 14 feet here.
Oh, so that's too high for a horse or a cow as well? You can have a horse sitting on the shoulder of a cow and still not do that.
That's much too high for domestic livestock.
So this is caused by an animal which no longer exists in North America.
So what is it? I think it's mammoth.
And 14 feet is actually the shoulder height of really large Columbian mammoth.
- Oh, that's just fantastic! - Isn't it? A Columbian mammoth had the same characteristic shape as the woolly mammoth, with a domed head.
But a Columbian was much larger and virtually bald.
Its tusks were magnificent, much longer than an elephant's.
The herd arrives at a favourite stop-over.
A chance to exfoliate and scrape off some parasites.
Amongst these rocks you can feel the presence of those Ice Age beasts.
It's almost as though the ghosts of the mammoth are still with us.
But where were these migrating Columbian mammoths actually going to? Surely they didn't come all this way just for a scratch? Once again, the Ice Age holds the answer.
As more and more water froze, there was less to fill the oceans.
At the height of the last Ice Age, the global sea level would have been 120 metres lower than it is today.
So here on the coast of Northern California, the land would have extended out, almost to the horizon.
The great bay of San Francisco became a vast, verdant valley.
From the Golden Gate, the land stretched 26 miles out to sea.
What is now a lonely coastal outcrop, back then, was a milestone in a lost land.
The Columbian mammoths themselves contain clues as to what this place was like.
Their teeth are like millstones, perfect for grinding up two tons of grass every week! This land was a vast prairie.
Today, nearly all of the mammoth's coastal grassland lies beneath the waves.
But there is one fragment left.
This is Point Reyes and it is a tiny fragment of what was once a vast coastal prairie.
This vegetation is perhaps the closest that we can get to what was out there on the coastal plains.
This is bunch grass and it's incredibly tough stuff.
It positively thrives on being grazed right down to the ground and then it sprouts back again.
And amongst the grasses, we've got beautiful wild flowers.
There are irises and buttercups amongst them.
They look fantastic but they taste horrible.
And that is an adaptation against being grazed.
So what we've got here is a heavily grazed landscape.
Today, the grazer is the cattle.
Back in the Ice Age, it was the hungry mega-herbivores - the horse, the bison and the mammoth.
Just one Ice Age grazer survives here - the tule elk.
Such fleeting glimpses of the Ice Age might have been all we had, were it not for one truly amazing discovery .
.
one which means we can rebuild Ice Age America with all of its creatures - great and small! I need to return south.
This is just so strange.
There seems to be a road pouring down the side of this hill, and this is asphalt, but it's natural asphalt and at the top of it, I'm hoping to find some sticky tar coming up out of the ground.
Now this looks a bit more like it.
I don't really want to step down here because I suspect that this could be quite sticky, so let's prod it and see.
Yeah, look at that.
We've got some lovely, sticky tar coming up there.
Natural asphalt or tar is very similar to heavy crude oil.
In parts of California, it wells up through cracks in the earth.
Deposits like this drove California's oil boom.
But in 1913, workers at the Rancho La Brea drilling site discovered more than they bargained for - thousands of fossils.
Extinct giants that had become trapped in the tar during the Ice Age.
Rancho La Brea became the most sensational Ice Age fossil site in the world.
And important new discoveries are still being made.
In the vaults, there are over three million specimens, representing more than 600 different species - including the star of the show.
There are hundreds of sabre-tooth cats - Smilodons - in this collection.
In fact, as we walk down this corridor, everything down here on my left and my right - it's all Smilodon as far as the eye can see.
Smilodon, Smilodon, Smilodon, all the way to the end of this corridor.
And then we turn around and we're into herbivore alley.
We start with two species of bovid.
This is Bison antiquus and then on the right here, we are into equus - horses.
We have two species of horse at La Brea.
Here is the Western Horse.
And these are its toe-bones which bore the hooves.
And then we have three species of sloth.
And these are perhaps my favourite species of animal actually at La Brea after the sabre-tooth cats.
And right towards the end of this corridor we are going to find Paramylodon, or Harlan's ground sloth.
Here it is.
And these are its finger bones.
Just imagine the claws that then extended from them, quite formidable.
And we've got two species of the camel family.
Over here, these are the neck vertebrae of Yesterday's Camel.
And that's quite impressive but we haven't got onto the four species of mustelid - that's weasels and badgers, and the three species of rabbit, the two species of deer, two species of antelope, two species of elephant, one of tapir and one of peccaries.
And that's not even counting the small mammals.
Each creature is helping to populate that empty Ice Age landscape.
And the tar keeps on revealing more about the land of the sabre-tooth cat.
A few years ago, the Museum of Art over there next to the tar pits decided it wanted an underground car park, but there are tar pits over there as well.
So the palaeontologists were called in, and rather than rush through an excavation there and then, they took the sediment out en bloc, and brought it back over here in these massive wooden crates and now they're carefully excavating each one of them.
The place feels more like a trailer park than a palaeontological dig! 'Each box is excavated, grain by grain, 'by its own resident palaeontologist.
' - Laura.
- Oh, hi.
- Hello.
- Hi.
Welcome to box one! Laura has been here for nearly a year.
What are you actually excavating here? It's a real mass of bones.
It really, really is.
It's just a kind of a tangled mess at this point.
Um, but I've got baby bison, maxilla, so, front of his face.
This one here, you can see his teeth down there.
- And from more teeth, I got dire wolf, lower jaw.
- Yeah.
'So far, she's got through two metres of bone deposits.
' It's painstaking work.
- But it's fun! I get to dig for buried treasure for my job.
- Yeah! This whole project, Project 23 - what's the most exciting thing that's emerged from it so far, do you think? One of my favourite things anyway is from box 1.
We havewe kind of nicknamed our own entire family of sabre-tooth cats.
So far, just from this one deposit right here, we have at least three adults, three sub-adults - teenagers, and four separate sabre-tooth kittens.
- Kittens? - Like you can see right here.
- Sabre-tooth kittens! - I know! Let's see, I have sabre-tooth kitten.
Ulna.
So that's one of the forearm bones.
We've got more sabre-tooth kitten, we have a thoracic vertebrae.
Middle of his back.
And let's see, just over here, that's half from the pelvis.
This one's from an adult sabre-tooth cat.
In fact, there's this one day that I actually found three separate sabre-tooth kitten sabres all in one day.
I must admit, that's probably one of my favourite days here.
The kittens' remains are being scrutinized by La Brea sabre-tooth cat expert Chris Shaw.
These are the most recent sabre-tooth cat bones that we have gotten from their project here.
And these kittens are fantastic.
We've got their little milk teeth, sabres.
- Those are the milk teeth.
- Can I pick that one up? - Yes, you may.
- Thank you.
- These are the real thing.
- Wow! And you'll notice, too - if you rub your finger along the edge - of that, it's actually serrated and very sharp.
- Ooh! - That's like a knife blade.
- Exactly.
These animals could puncture skin much like the adults.
You can feel thoseI can barely see those serrations, they're really tiny, aren't they? - But I can certainly feel them, rubbing my finger along it.
- Yes.
And these teeth grow in, and were actually erupted at the time of birth.
It's unlikely that the kittens used their sabre teeth to kill.
Their serrated teeth were like steak knives, ideal for scavenging after Mum had made the kill.
The sheer number of specimens here gives scientists the chance to understand not only the anatomy, but the behaviour of these extinct cats.
And one find, in particular, is transforming our understanding of how sabre-tooth cats behaved.
It's a disfigured pelvis, one that shows signs of a condition that I've seen before - in humans.
This is one of my favourite specimens.
What you have is a very, very nasty injury, and a massive, massive infection.
ThisI was going to say, this looks to me like septic arthritis.
This looks like the type of bone growth that you get around a joint which has become infected.
It's exactly that.
And the femur itself, the thigh bone, is really, really worn down.
That's just quite shocking.
I mean, this would have been an animal - which was limping.
- Right, exactly.
This animal wouldn't have been able to run after prey, and yet we can say, looking at this, - this has been a long-standing condition.
- Absolutely.
For all of this bone to have grown to this extent, this animal has survived for months and possibly even years with this going on.
That's absolutely correct and that's the premise of my idea, that these animals were in fact social animals.
That would enable this animal to survive because the rest of the group would bring in the food and nurture this animal by letting it feed at kills.
So not only did this giant cat possess daggers for teeth, it's likely that it hunted in groups, much like lions today.
Sabre-tooth cats must have been utterly terrifying.
A herd of Columbian mammoths is making its annual migration from the coast.
A young male wanders away from the herd .
.
straight into the path of a pack of sabre-tooth cats.
But the tar makes it impossible for them to escape.
This is their last meal.
The tar has preserved dramatic stories of Ice Age giants.
But it also holds clues to the world they lived in.
Hidden amongst the giant bones are much smaller ones.
And it's these microfossils that can tell us just why this place was such a happy hunting ground for sabre-tooth cats.
Tiny animals like snails and beetles are very sensitive to climate.
So these species are the best indicators of what the lost Ice Age environment was really like.
What we find is that this area of Southern California was in fact cooler and wetter and more lush.
A beautiful, temperate parkland of open areas and woods, populated by these magnificent animals.
For America, the Ice Age was actually the golden age of megafauna.
But meanwhile, in the rest of the northern hemisphere, the ice sheets were going to have a very different impact.
The most bitter struggle that the Ice Age animals would face was not in North America but here, on the other side of the Atlantic in the mountains and plains of Europe and Siberia.
Here, the Ice Age hit with brutal force.
Next time, I witness the struggle to survive.
Deep within a cave in Transylvania, grisly remains tell of a spectacular fight to the death.
THEY ROAR FEROCIOUSLY And the woolly mammoth faces its own battle for survival against a new and cunning predator.
.
the Ice Age.
Now we can go back in time .
.
because out of the permafrost, from deep inside caves, and from hostile deserts, the astonishing remains of giant animals are emerging.
How amazing to be one of the first people to see this ancient creature.
The Ice Age was the last time such creatures would walk the Earth.
A lost Eden with mammoths taller than any elephant, cats with seven-inch teeth, and some of the strangest beasts that have ever existed.
I'm fascinated by what the remains of ancient animals can tell us about THEM, and the world they lived in.
Using new scientific advances, we can reveal how they lived, and why they died out.
Come with me, back to the Ice Age.
A world ruled by giants! The Great Ice Age was triggered by a combination of natural forces acting on a colossal scale.
Continents moved.
The planet shifted in its orbit.
Earth was battered by a merciless cycle of freeze and thaw.
The last freeze started around 80,000 years ago.
A vast ice sheet marched down from the Arctic, across a continent that today we call North America.
Known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, it wiped out everything in its path.
It advanced down over the continent, and life retreated before it.
No animals or plants could survive on its endless icy plains.
It might seem like a catastrophe, but beyond the ice, incredibly, the continent saw an explosion of life .
.
making America the best place in the world to discover long-lost giants.
I'm going south of where the ice sheet once lay, searching for megafauna - the great beasts of the Ice Age.
Where else would you go for an encounter with the ultimate Ice Age celebrity? This is the territory of one of the most iconic and terrifying animals of the Ice Age.
This is Los Angeles.
A place with a surprisingly deep past.
This glittering city, today the home of movie stars and billionaires is also a portal to a lost world.
Here, we can step back in time and meet this awesome creature face to face.
Smilodon fatalis, a sabre-tooth cat, surveys her territory CAT GROWLS .
.
some of the richest hunting grounds in the Ice Age world.
CAT ROARS There is something primal and nightmarish about these teeth.
But exactly how they were used has been a mystery.
You can't help but be impressed by this fantastic skull and these formidable teeth, but this construction presented Smilodon with a problem.
These teeth are so long and thin that they're actually very vulnerable.
If they were to get stuck in the sinews or the bone of a violently struggling animal, there's a real danger they could snap.
It's certainly not a problem faced by any large predator today.
The big cats of the African plains kill large prey by suffocation.
Either by smothering .
.
or by crushing the windpipe.
Remarkably, the canines of a lion rarely even break the skin.
But Smilodon could not have killed in this way.
Blaire Van Valkenburgh has spent decades puzzling it out.
Her evidence points to a method of killing unique to sabre-tooth cats.
Their teeth were used for stabbing.
What we THINK is that they went for the throat because there is a lot of structures in there that make you quite vulnerable, such as your windpipe, or jugular vein or carotid arteries, these mass of arteries that feed blood to the brain.
But Blaire needed to figure out how a sabre-tooth cat could safely deliver this stabbing death blow.
How does its skull compare with other big cats? A CT scan reveals that the temporal bone, where the jaw joins the skull is incredibly thick in a sabre-tooth cat, much thicker than in a lion or a cheetah.
That means a chillingly powerful bite and massive jaw muscles.
To land that lethal bite, their mouths could open wide, twice as wide as any lion.
With these canines, they could drive these two things together and then pull backwards .
.
and take out a large amount of flesh .
.
making the animal probably bleed to death within minutes.
A brutal technique that few animals could defend against.
An American horse.
To despatch it, this cat must go in hard and kill quickly.
It's at the moment of the kill that the cat's teeth are at their most vulnerable.
The secret to protecting them lies in its bones.
Usually what we see in association with having big canine teeth like that in these kinds of sabre-toothed species is their sort of over-muscled forelimbs.
They have very heavy, strong forelimbs, like wrestlers.
And pig paws, too.
Their paws are enlarged with big dewclaws, here and then they could grasp the prey and hold it steady, one paw holding the head, one holding the body, and then apply this killing bite, just where they need to put it and thereby minimise the risk to themselves of breaking those teeth.
With these incredibly powerful forelimbs, it would pull down its prey before dispatching it with these terrifying teeth.
PREY NEIGHS CAT ROARS Everything about a sabre-toothed cat, its teeth, its killing technique and its muscular body, point to one thing - this predator was designed to hunt large prey.
During the Ice Age, sabre-tooth cats flourished right across the continent.
So America must been full of large animals for them to hunt.
My next giant may not be as famous as its sabre-toothed predator but for me, it's even more extraordinary.
It inhabited the most spectacular part of America.
I'm looking for Ice Age secrets in the desert landscape of the Grand Canyon.
This creature left behind something far more revealing than just its teeth and bones.
Hidden somewhere high up amongst these towering walls and spires is its lair.
Thank you! Nothrotheriops shastensis - the Shasta ground sloth.
As large as a grizzly bear.
She walks on the sides of her feet, ponderous as she browses.
But she has seven-inch-long claws.
Too dangerous - even for a sabre-tooth.
THEY ROAR With such a huge body to feed, she isn't really what you'd expect to find in a desert.
Jim Mead is a world expert in ground sloths.
He'll help me track it down.
Today, in the Grand Canyon, a lot of the plants here are either poisonous or, like this jumping cholla cactus, covered in vicious spines.
The hideous spines of the barrel cactus were even used by the Aztecs for sacrificing victims.
A clue as to how the ground sloth survived here lies within its lair.
To find it, we have to retrace the animal's journey, right up into the high canyon walls.
Are we nearly there yet, Jim? A long way! As our eyes adjust to the gloom of the cave, I can't quite believe what I'm seeing.
So Jim - what is this, is this what it looks like? This is just a pile of dung of a Shasta ground sloth, an extinct animal of the Ice Age, and we have a whole pile of it here.
I just find it utterly unbelievable that this ancient animal's faeces are still here.
I mean, that looks like a piece of relatively fresh dung which has just been dried out.
Why on earth hasn't it rotted away? There's no water.
It's a totally dry cave.
And so without the water, you don't get the decay to mumify it.
And it's preserved, and it's preserving a very unique record of this animal.
You can see all these definite twigs.
It's not a good digester.
It's doing a very poor job of digesting, which is wonderful for us, cos here's the data.
It's incredible to be holding the remains of a meal, eaten by this giant animal, during the Ice Age.
The dung reveals that the sloth's menu was richer than what's on offer today.
There were also juniper and single-leaf ash trees growing here.
But it's still a big challenge for any digestive system.
A clue as to how the ground sloth survived lies with its relatives - the ones that didn't go extinct.
A tree sloth.
She lives high up in the canopy of the South American rainforest .
.
dining on tough and toxic leaves.
It will take her weeks to digest them, and for precious little energy .
.
which is why sloths are so terribly slow.
The ground sloths of the Ice Age were adapted for THEIR strange diets, too.
If you could peer inside a ground sloth, you'd see a huge fermenting gut.
A Shasta ground sloth was basically a compost heap on legs.
It could digest pretty much anything.
The downside was a sluggish metabolism, just like sloths today.
But the sloth's dung tells us a lot more than just what it ate.
It's also a record of one species's struggle for survival during the Ice Age.
So, all of this that looks like sediment is in fact excrement? This is all dung, this is all dry preserved dung and what you're seeing is the surface here, it's probably dating on the neighbourhood of 20,000 and you're seeing going back through time down into different layers, further and further.
We've obviously got some other animals here as well as ground sloths, there are tiny little pellets here, too.
So what are those? These little pellets would be pack rats, little rodents.
They're also scurrying around in here.
And yeah, we'll find a little bit of that.
But most of this stuff, most of this material, that is still Shasta ground sloth dung? 99% is Shasta ground sloth right here.
You get this pungent smell, and curiously, it's like a wine.
The sweeter it is, it's older.
This is old.
Just by the smell, it's old.
Do you ever think you've seen or smelled too much dung? Never! This is wonderful.
At the back of the cave, the dung really piles up.
And it's here that the beginning and the end of the Shasta ground sloth's story is written.
- So this is where we're starting to get deeper and deeper.
- Oh, yeah! - More and more time.
- It's really building up here.
- Yeah.
It's all through here.
Now this is the profile I really want to show you.
- This is incredibly deep at this point.
- Yeah.
What we have is a metre and a half of almost pure Shasta ground sloth dung.
If we look at the bottom of the unit, so we're looking at about, oh, say 40,000 years ago, the sloth dung is kind of telling us this is a good time to be in the Grand Canyon.
Then when we get to THIS point right in here, now we're at 23,000 years old and something is happening.
Oh, so this has changed completely.
Now we're down into what looks like these little pellets.
Is this the pack rats again? Yeah, all pack rat midden and different plants.
And then this is about 16,000 years old.
These dates are really significant because this means we are looking at the peak of the last Ice Age and it seems that for some reason, ground sloths aren't here at that time.
That's precisely it, something is going on during the full glacial.
As the ice reached its maximum extent, ground sloths abandoned the Grand Canyon.
It was too dry for their favourite plants.
And the drop in temperature didn't help.
Sloths, with their slow metabolism, would have struggled to keep warm.
It's easy to imagine chaos as the Ice Age really began to bite, with those giant ice sheets descending over half the continent.
But although the sloth suffered, other giants thrived during the Ice Age .
.
none more so than one that used to stalk the badlands of Arizona.
Back in the Ice Age, not everywhere was cold and dry.
Large swathes of Arizona were covered in swamp .
.
home to an Ice Age giant that is possibly the weirdest mammal ever.
So weird that scientists can't even agree quite what it looked like.
A team from Arizona's Museum of Natural History has just found an impressive new specimen.
The surrounding soil has been dug away and the creature, encased in plaster, ready to be moved.
Dave Gillette is obsessed with these animals.
Dave, what are these creatures? These are animals called glyptodonts.
They're known for their rigid shell.
It's quite strange looking at it like this, all covered in plaster.
How big is the specimen inside that? Oh, it occupies almost the entire contents, as far as we can tell.
Right, so this is a large creature? Yes, and it's an upside-down shell so that it's belly up, so to speak.
Strangely, most of the glyptodonts Dave has discovered have been found upside down.
I can't wait to see what these creatures were like.
But first, Dave must solve the puzzle of how to get this one out of the ground.
This is all really exciting.
We're going to more the A-frame out of the way and the glytptodont can start its journey.
It's been here for two million years and it's just about to go on its travels.
The only thing holding this two-ton lump of fossil and earth together is the fragile coat of plaster.
Do you think that the weight is OK, just on these four-by-fours? All right.
Whoo! - I feel like - oh, happy day! - Yeah.
Goodbye, glyptodont! SHE LAUGHS This find will join the world's greatest collection of glyptodonts at the museum in Mesa.
Dave pieces together these specimens to get a better picture of this bizarre creature.
Ah, Dave, these are fantastic! Are they all from Arizona as well? These are all from same area where we just finished excavating.
Is this a hand or a foot we're looking at here? These are probably digging feet.
We think that glyptodonts had a very strong digging motion.
That's wonderful.
What's this - is this a tail? This is a tail.
- Each vertebra was protected by bony plates all the way around.
- Yeah.
And in fact the tail could be a weapon.
It's incredibly chunky, isn't it? It's amazing, yeah.
And this is a vertebra.
This is really odd.
It's so peculiar, cos I'm seeing bits of anatomy that I kind of recognise but it all seems to be a bit twisted.
It's all very strange-looking to me.
But it's still a mammal, so you can still recognise it as a mammal, even if it is strange.
A very weird mammal.
A very weird mammal.
So put all the bits together, and what have you got? A bony shell with a belly that was covered in soft fur.
An armoured tail and formidable claws.
Just one crucial bit missing.
What would the face of this glyptodont have looked like? Well, the face would have been very cheeky, fat on the side.
The trunk would have extended from the nasal bones and extended for a foot or more.
It had a trunk? I think it had a trunk.
There's a lot of debate about that but I don't see any other feeding mechanism for glyptodonts.
And do you think the bony arrangement that we can see here looks like it would have supported a trunk as well? I think it does.
I see muscle scars on the front of these descending processes.
That's great.
I mean, - those are muscles which - in us - make us smile.
- That's right.
But in the glyptodont, they're about moving its trunk around.
Well, maybe they could smile a little, too! THEY LAUGH It's by far the oddest mammal I've ever seen.
More like some sort of mythological creature, like an enormous armadillo with a trunk! Even its teeth are peculiar.
Look at its jaw - that's wonderful! This is spectacular.
This is the left jaw, and these are the teeth.
You see, there are eight teeth - all cheek teeth, no canines and no incisors.
Oh, right.
Yeah, and each tooth has three lobes.
You can see there are grooves on the teeth and the ridges.
So what were they eating with these teeth? Well, they were eating soft vegetation around the streams and lakes.
These strange Christmas-tree-shaped teeth were made to chew on aquatic plants.
Dave has found another unusual creature alongside the glyptodont.
The capybara .
.
a giant rodent that still lives in the tropical swamps of South America.
And in the Ice Age, it shared the Arizonan swamp with glyptodonts.
So could they swim? I'm sure they could swim.
I'm sure they could swim with other glyptodonts and capybaras and other animals in the water.
Unlike its furry neighbour, this glyptodont is a challenge for any predator.
Slow-moving perhaps, but armoured like a tank.
A stand-off between two males.
Each one is a ton of muscle and solid bone.
THEY SCREECH Vanquished, the loser struggles to right himself.
If a glyptodont died in the water, its bloated body would turn belly-up and eventually sink down to the river bed .
.
which could explain why so many are found upside down.
So what turned the deserts into swamp? The answer lies with the impact the Great Ice Age had on the world.
Over the last two and a half million years, there has been not just one Ice Age, but around 20 of them.
Fossils reveal that every time the ice sheet grew, the Arizonan marshes expanded and the number of glyptodonts rose.
And when the ice shrank, their numbers fell.
The ice sheet was acting like a vast mountain range, two miles high, big enough to divert moisture-laden Pacific winds, pushing them south THUNDERCLAPS .
.
watering the desert and turning it into a lush wetland paradise.
Across the continent, the Ice Age created new worlds for other giants to exploit.
And there's one animal in particular that benefited.
The greatest giant of them all.
Hidden in the sea mist, on a coastal plain just north of San Francisco, some large rocks stand tall .
.
sentinels that still bear witness to the wanderings of an Ice Age leviathan.
State archaeologist Breck Parkman has spent decades examining every square inch of these rocks.
- Look at this.
- It's polished.
- It is polished.
- What do you think caused it - is it weathering? No, actually, I think this is all from animals.
Every bit of this is from animals.
Large mammals often need a good scratch, perhaps to dislodge unwanted guests, like ticks.
Breck believes that over a long period of time animals have polished these rocks to a shine.
Have you tested this hypothesis? I have.
We've worked in the lab, and we have taken samples of rocks that were known to be polished by wind and by water and by faulting and it doesn't compare.
We've actually looked at something like three or four dozen other ideas, some of which are crazy, you know - what happens when kelp moves against the rocks, what happens with guano on the rocks, and what happens here - and you have to see it, though, and you're seeing it today - you have to see it to see the selectivity.
Where is the polish and where isn't it? And it's these knobs and overhangs - it's up to a certain height and doesn't go higher.
Some surfaces have been worn mirror-smooth.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's a massive area of polish.
But there's one very revealing bit of polishing.
Wait until you see this rock! So what have we got here? Well, we have more polish.
But look at this.
Look at how high this polish is.
Oh, yeah! That's a bit too high for a sheep.
And look at this.
This is just the beginning.
this polish goes right on up, right on up as high as I can reach.
This is close to 14 feet here.
Oh, so that's too high for a horse or a cow as well? You can have a horse sitting on the shoulder of a cow and still not do that.
That's much too high for domestic livestock.
So this is caused by an animal which no longer exists in North America.
So what is it? I think it's mammoth.
And 14 feet is actually the shoulder height of really large Columbian mammoth.
- Oh, that's just fantastic! - Isn't it? A Columbian mammoth had the same characteristic shape as the woolly mammoth, with a domed head.
But a Columbian was much larger and virtually bald.
Its tusks were magnificent, much longer than an elephant's.
The herd arrives at a favourite stop-over.
A chance to exfoliate and scrape off some parasites.
Amongst these rocks you can feel the presence of those Ice Age beasts.
It's almost as though the ghosts of the mammoth are still with us.
But where were these migrating Columbian mammoths actually going to? Surely they didn't come all this way just for a scratch? Once again, the Ice Age holds the answer.
As more and more water froze, there was less to fill the oceans.
At the height of the last Ice Age, the global sea level would have been 120 metres lower than it is today.
So here on the coast of Northern California, the land would have extended out, almost to the horizon.
The great bay of San Francisco became a vast, verdant valley.
From the Golden Gate, the land stretched 26 miles out to sea.
What is now a lonely coastal outcrop, back then, was a milestone in a lost land.
The Columbian mammoths themselves contain clues as to what this place was like.
Their teeth are like millstones, perfect for grinding up two tons of grass every week! This land was a vast prairie.
Today, nearly all of the mammoth's coastal grassland lies beneath the waves.
But there is one fragment left.
This is Point Reyes and it is a tiny fragment of what was once a vast coastal prairie.
This vegetation is perhaps the closest that we can get to what was out there on the coastal plains.
This is bunch grass and it's incredibly tough stuff.
It positively thrives on being grazed right down to the ground and then it sprouts back again.
And amongst the grasses, we've got beautiful wild flowers.
There are irises and buttercups amongst them.
They look fantastic but they taste horrible.
And that is an adaptation against being grazed.
So what we've got here is a heavily grazed landscape.
Today, the grazer is the cattle.
Back in the Ice Age, it was the hungry mega-herbivores - the horse, the bison and the mammoth.
Just one Ice Age grazer survives here - the tule elk.
Such fleeting glimpses of the Ice Age might have been all we had, were it not for one truly amazing discovery .
.
one which means we can rebuild Ice Age America with all of its creatures - great and small! I need to return south.
This is just so strange.
There seems to be a road pouring down the side of this hill, and this is asphalt, but it's natural asphalt and at the top of it, I'm hoping to find some sticky tar coming up out of the ground.
Now this looks a bit more like it.
I don't really want to step down here because I suspect that this could be quite sticky, so let's prod it and see.
Yeah, look at that.
We've got some lovely, sticky tar coming up there.
Natural asphalt or tar is very similar to heavy crude oil.
In parts of California, it wells up through cracks in the earth.
Deposits like this drove California's oil boom.
But in 1913, workers at the Rancho La Brea drilling site discovered more than they bargained for - thousands of fossils.
Extinct giants that had become trapped in the tar during the Ice Age.
Rancho La Brea became the most sensational Ice Age fossil site in the world.
And important new discoveries are still being made.
In the vaults, there are over three million specimens, representing more than 600 different species - including the star of the show.
There are hundreds of sabre-tooth cats - Smilodons - in this collection.
In fact, as we walk down this corridor, everything down here on my left and my right - it's all Smilodon as far as the eye can see.
Smilodon, Smilodon, Smilodon, all the way to the end of this corridor.
And then we turn around and we're into herbivore alley.
We start with two species of bovid.
This is Bison antiquus and then on the right here, we are into equus - horses.
We have two species of horse at La Brea.
Here is the Western Horse.
And these are its toe-bones which bore the hooves.
And then we have three species of sloth.
And these are perhaps my favourite species of animal actually at La Brea after the sabre-tooth cats.
And right towards the end of this corridor we are going to find Paramylodon, or Harlan's ground sloth.
Here it is.
And these are its finger bones.
Just imagine the claws that then extended from them, quite formidable.
And we've got two species of the camel family.
Over here, these are the neck vertebrae of Yesterday's Camel.
And that's quite impressive but we haven't got onto the four species of mustelid - that's weasels and badgers, and the three species of rabbit, the two species of deer, two species of antelope, two species of elephant, one of tapir and one of peccaries.
And that's not even counting the small mammals.
Each creature is helping to populate that empty Ice Age landscape.
And the tar keeps on revealing more about the land of the sabre-tooth cat.
A few years ago, the Museum of Art over there next to the tar pits decided it wanted an underground car park, but there are tar pits over there as well.
So the palaeontologists were called in, and rather than rush through an excavation there and then, they took the sediment out en bloc, and brought it back over here in these massive wooden crates and now they're carefully excavating each one of them.
The place feels more like a trailer park than a palaeontological dig! 'Each box is excavated, grain by grain, 'by its own resident palaeontologist.
' - Laura.
- Oh, hi.
- Hello.
- Hi.
Welcome to box one! Laura has been here for nearly a year.
What are you actually excavating here? It's a real mass of bones.
It really, really is.
It's just a kind of a tangled mess at this point.
Um, but I've got baby bison, maxilla, so, front of his face.
This one here, you can see his teeth down there.
- And from more teeth, I got dire wolf, lower jaw.
- Yeah.
'So far, she's got through two metres of bone deposits.
' It's painstaking work.
- But it's fun! I get to dig for buried treasure for my job.
- Yeah! This whole project, Project 23 - what's the most exciting thing that's emerged from it so far, do you think? One of my favourite things anyway is from box 1.
We havewe kind of nicknamed our own entire family of sabre-tooth cats.
So far, just from this one deposit right here, we have at least three adults, three sub-adults - teenagers, and four separate sabre-tooth kittens.
- Kittens? - Like you can see right here.
- Sabre-tooth kittens! - I know! Let's see, I have sabre-tooth kitten.
Ulna.
So that's one of the forearm bones.
We've got more sabre-tooth kitten, we have a thoracic vertebrae.
Middle of his back.
And let's see, just over here, that's half from the pelvis.
This one's from an adult sabre-tooth cat.
In fact, there's this one day that I actually found three separate sabre-tooth kitten sabres all in one day.
I must admit, that's probably one of my favourite days here.
The kittens' remains are being scrutinized by La Brea sabre-tooth cat expert Chris Shaw.
These are the most recent sabre-tooth cat bones that we have gotten from their project here.
And these kittens are fantastic.
We've got their little milk teeth, sabres.
- Those are the milk teeth.
- Can I pick that one up? - Yes, you may.
- Thank you.
- These are the real thing.
- Wow! And you'll notice, too - if you rub your finger along the edge - of that, it's actually serrated and very sharp.
- Ooh! - That's like a knife blade.
- Exactly.
These animals could puncture skin much like the adults.
You can feel thoseI can barely see those serrations, they're really tiny, aren't they? - But I can certainly feel them, rubbing my finger along it.
- Yes.
And these teeth grow in, and were actually erupted at the time of birth.
It's unlikely that the kittens used their sabre teeth to kill.
Their serrated teeth were like steak knives, ideal for scavenging after Mum had made the kill.
The sheer number of specimens here gives scientists the chance to understand not only the anatomy, but the behaviour of these extinct cats.
And one find, in particular, is transforming our understanding of how sabre-tooth cats behaved.
It's a disfigured pelvis, one that shows signs of a condition that I've seen before - in humans.
This is one of my favourite specimens.
What you have is a very, very nasty injury, and a massive, massive infection.
ThisI was going to say, this looks to me like septic arthritis.
This looks like the type of bone growth that you get around a joint which has become infected.
It's exactly that.
And the femur itself, the thigh bone, is really, really worn down.
That's just quite shocking.
I mean, this would have been an animal - which was limping.
- Right, exactly.
This animal wouldn't have been able to run after prey, and yet we can say, looking at this, - this has been a long-standing condition.
- Absolutely.
For all of this bone to have grown to this extent, this animal has survived for months and possibly even years with this going on.
That's absolutely correct and that's the premise of my idea, that these animals were in fact social animals.
That would enable this animal to survive because the rest of the group would bring in the food and nurture this animal by letting it feed at kills.
So not only did this giant cat possess daggers for teeth, it's likely that it hunted in groups, much like lions today.
Sabre-tooth cats must have been utterly terrifying.
A herd of Columbian mammoths is making its annual migration from the coast.
A young male wanders away from the herd .
.
straight into the path of a pack of sabre-tooth cats.
But the tar makes it impossible for them to escape.
This is their last meal.
The tar has preserved dramatic stories of Ice Age giants.
But it also holds clues to the world they lived in.
Hidden amongst the giant bones are much smaller ones.
And it's these microfossils that can tell us just why this place was such a happy hunting ground for sabre-tooth cats.
Tiny animals like snails and beetles are very sensitive to climate.
So these species are the best indicators of what the lost Ice Age environment was really like.
What we find is that this area of Southern California was in fact cooler and wetter and more lush.
A beautiful, temperate parkland of open areas and woods, populated by these magnificent animals.
For America, the Ice Age was actually the golden age of megafauna.
But meanwhile, in the rest of the northern hemisphere, the ice sheets were going to have a very different impact.
The most bitter struggle that the Ice Age animals would face was not in North America but here, on the other side of the Atlantic in the mountains and plains of Europe and Siberia.
Here, the Ice Age hit with brutal force.
Next time, I witness the struggle to survive.
Deep within a cave in Transylvania, grisly remains tell of a spectacular fight to the death.
THEY ROAR FEROCIOUSLY And the woolly mammoth faces its own battle for survival against a new and cunning predator.