The Future Is Wild

The Future Is Wild is a British 2002 thirteen-part speculative documentary television miniseries that shows how life could evolve in the future if humans were to disappear from the Earth. It originally ran in the United Kingdom from April 2 to June 25, 2002 and was narrated by Christian Rodska. It was later aired as a single 90-minute program in the United States on Animal Planet on January 1, 2003 and was narrated by Tim White. This version was later split and extended into three two hour episodes that aired from July 8-22, 2003.

5 million years' time
The early episodes describe a world after an ice age, when giant sea birds roam the beaches and carnivorous bats rule the skies. Ice sheets extend as far south as Paris in the northern hemisphere and as far north as Buenos Aires in the southern hemisphere. The Amazon rainforest has dried up and become a grassland. The North American plains have become a cold desert, and Africa has collided with Europe, enclosing the Mediterranean Sea. Without water to replace it in the dry climate, the Mediterranean has dried out into a salt flat dotted with brine lakes, as it has been in the past. Most of Europe is a frozen tundra. The part of Africa east of the African Rift Valley has broken away from the rest of the continent. Asia has dried up and is now mountainous. The once warm, tropical area of Central America has been transformed into a dry area. Australia has moved north and collided with western Indonesia.

Profiles species

 * Brine flies

Hypothesized species

 * Babookari, a ground-living New World monkey descended from the present-day uakari
 * Carakiller, a giant, 2-meter (7 foot) tall, flightless bird of prey descended from the present-day mountain caracara
 * Cryptile, a lizard that inhabits salt flats and has a sticky neck frill for catching flies
 * Deathgleaner, a giant, carnivorous bat descended from the spectral bat of South and Central America
 * Gannetwhale, a large, flightless seal-like seabird descended from the present-day gannet
 * Rattleback, an armored rodent descended from the present-day agouti; there are two species, one in the Amazonian grasslands and the other in the northern deserts
 * Gryken, a slender terrestrial mustelid descended from the present-day pine marten
 * Scrofa, a wild pig living on the Mediterranean salt flats; descended from the wild boar
 * Shagrat, a giant, capybara-like rodent found in the tundra of northern Europe; descended from the present-day marmot
 * Snowstalker, a large, white, saber-toothed mustelid from northern Europe; descended from the present-day wolverine
 * Spink, a small, mole-like, burrowing bird found in southern North America; descended from the present-day quail

100 million years' time
In the scenario 100 million years in the future, the world is much hotter than at present. Octopuses and giant tortoises have come on to the land, much of which is flooded by shallow seas surrounded by brackish swamps. Antarctica has drifted towards the tropics and is covered with dense rainforests, as it was before. Australia has collided with North America and Asia, forcing up an enormous, 12-kilometre-high mountain plateau much taller than the Himalayas. Greenland has been reduced to a small, temperate island. There are cold, deep ocean trenches. The Sahara has once again become the rich grassland it was millions of years ago.

Profiled species

 * Red algae, a protist that is alive today and evolves into a plantlike shape to form reefs in the absence of corals and forge a symbiosis with the Reef Gliders

Hypothesized species

 * Falconfly, a giant predatory wasp descended from the sand wasp
 * Grass Tree, a plant species of the Great Plateau, harvested by Silver Spiders to feed the Poggles; descended from bamboo
 * Great Blue Windrunner, a giant, blue 3-meter (9 foot) wingspan, four-winged crane whose legs have feathers that can act as gliding surfaces; descended from a present-day crane
 * Lurkfish, a giant, big-mouthed, electric fish charged up with 1,000 volts of electricity descended from the electric catfish
 * Nursery Vase, a plant that traps water within it and is used as a nursery by the Swampus in a very close symbiosis. It is similar to the present-day pineapple and bromeliad and is possibly descended from their lineage
 * Ocean Phantom, a giant descendant of the Portuguese Man o' War.
 * Poggle, the last surviving mammal, living inside mountains and descended from a species of social rodent
 * Reef Glider, a giant, swimming sea slug
 * Roachcutter, a swift species of Flutterbird, a variety of birds unique to Antarctica that descended from the modern-day tubenosed seabirds
 * Silver Spider, a large colonial spider
 * Spindle Trooper, a giant sea spider that lives in Ocean Phantoms, which they defend against enemies
 * Spitfire Bird, a species of Flutterbird that shoots acidic flower nectar from its nostrils as a defense
 * False Spitfire Bird, a Flutterbird species that mimics the Spitfire Bird to frighten such predators as the Falconfly
 * Spitfire Beetle, a cooperative, predatory beetle that preys on Spitfire Birds
 * Spitfire Tree, a flowering tree that makes two chemicals collected by Spitfire Birds, which pollinate the trees in the process
 * Swampus, a semi-terrestrial, brackish swamp-dwelling octopus
 * Toraton, a giant tortoise that grows to 120 tons

200 million years' time
The hypothetical world of 200 million years from now is recovering from a mass extinction caused by a flooded basalt eruption even larger than the one that created the Siberian Traps, wiping out 99% of the species on the planet. Fish have taken to the skies, squid to the forests, and the world's largest-ever desert is filled with strange worms and insects. All the continents have collided with one another and fused into a single supercontinent, a second Pangaea. (A few present-day geographical features can still be discerned, including Hudson Bay, Novaya Zemlya and the Scandinavian Peninsula, as well as the general outline of Africa). One large global ocean with a single-current system gives rise to deadly hurricanes called hypercanes, which batter the coastlines of the continent all year long. The northwestern side of Pangaea II, drenched with an endless supply of rain, has become a temperate forest. Mountains resting at the end of the coast prevent most of the rain's moisture from reaching a long line of scrubby rainshadow deserts. The very center of the continent receives no rain at all and has become a barren, plantless desert. Only fish, arthropods, worms and mollusks were left to repopulate the earth.

Hypothesized species

 * Bumblebeetle, a fast-flying beetle that lives and breeds inside the carcasses of dead Ocean Flish
 * Deathbottle, a carnivorous plant living in the Rainshadow Desert
 * Desert Hopper, a hopping snail with a modified single foot
 * Forest Flish, a small, forest-dwelling, hummingbird-like fish that no longer lives in the oceans but instead flies like a bird (Flish being a portmanteau of flying and fish)
 * Ocean Flish, another type of Flish which relies on the oceans more than does the Forest Flish; like the Forest Flish, it is a descendant of flying fish
 * Garden Worm, an algae-filled worm that feeds only on sunlight
 * Gloomworm, a primitive-looking, bacteria-eating worm
 * Lichen Tree, a descendant of living lichens that has grown gigantic due to the high levels of moisture in its environment, reaching 10 feet (3 meters) in height
 * Megasquid, a 5-meter (16.5 feet high), 8-ton, omnivorous, terrestrial cephalopod; its eight arms have evolved into walking legs like an elephant's; it uses its two long tentacles for feeding (The megasquid is implied in the series to be a distant relative of the swampus of 100 million years earlier)
 * Rainbow squid, a 25-meter (82 feet) long, gentle, ocean-going cephalopod descended from squids
 * Sharkopath, a bioluminescent shark that hunts in packs, descended from sharks
 * Silverswimmers, a fish-sized neotenous crustacean; descended from plankton
 * Slickribbon, a cave-dwelling, 1-meter (3.2 feet) long, predatory worm with a striking resemblance to Opabinia of the Cambrian
 * Slithersucker, a large, predatory slime mold
 * Squibbon, a terrestrial cephalopod that swings from tree branches; it is highly intelligent and the likeliest ancestor for future life that may allow civilization to once again reestablish itself on Earth; like the Megasquid, it is descended from cephalopods
 * Terabyte (not to be confused with the information unit), a highly specialized colonial descendant of termites

Episodes
This is the series as presented prior to its American broadcast.