WHAT DO YOU CALL A SILLY BATTLE BETWEEN A WACKY FLOCK OF DODO BIRDS AND THREE PREHISTORIC MAMMALS? TAE KWON DODO!
The new movie Ice Age--which follows Manfred the mammoth, Diego the sabertooth, and Sid the ground sloth as they return a human baby to his tribe--is supposed to tickle your funny bone, not your brain. Good thing: Although the computer animation makes the action fry at you as realistically as Jackie Chan does, some scenes aren't so real. The three mammals did live among each other in real life, but dodo birds? Not a chance. The flightless dodo lived only on Mauritius, an island near Africa--far from where the mammals would have been hanging out. WORLD took a look at other scenes to see how the movie compares to its real-life inspirations. Here's what we found.
"SLOTHY-Y" JOE
When Sid insults two angry rhinos, he escapes as fast as an Olympic runner. But according to paleontologist H. Gregory McDonald, speed wasn't a sloth's specialty.
So why the Marion Jones impersonation? "At first, we wanted Sid to be slow, like a real sloth," says Ice Age animator aim Bresnahan. "But it wasn't funny. So we made him quick-moving."
A real ground sloth's best defense was thick fur and skin that served as armor. Sid's bad-tasting flesh might have kept him off the menu, too. McDonald says some sloths ate creosote bush and saltbush, two nasty-tasting plants. "How an animal tastes depends on what it eats," he says. "So I can see a hunter taking one bite and never hunting a sloth again."
No wonder Diego spits out Sid and says flatly: "I don't eat junk food"!
MAMMOTH-SIZE HERO
Manny may build a log shelter to stay dry and warm during a rainstorm, but real woolly mammoths wouldn't have bothered. Three-foot-long guard hairs and dense underwool rested on thick skin and four inches of fat. This "weather coating" kept mammoths warm even in subzero temperatures.
Although Sid makes a crack about Manny's 400-pounds-a-day plant diet, that's how much real woolly mammoths ate! The trips to the salad bar helped males reach heights of more than nine feet at the shoulder.
Though Manny tries to travel solo, real mammoths may have lived in small herds. One thing's for sure: That herd would not have included a pesky sloth!
COOL CAT
Don't tell Diego, but the movie gets his name wrong. Although he's called a saber-toothed tiger on-screen, scientists like William A. Akersten call them saber-toothed cats. (They also can simply be called sabertooths.)
Akersten says the movie accurately shows the saber-tooths hunting in a group called a pride. Their prey did include humans and mammoths, though they probably attacked mammoths smaller and weaker than Manny.
Same goes for the humans: Sabertooths probably would not have attacked a group of humans who could defend themselves, as Diego's pride did. "The cats would have been more likely to take out a lone human in the open" Akersten says.
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THE HUMAN TOUCH
Ice Age gets it right when it comes to the human characters, according to anthropologist Kristin Sobolik. Like the lost baby's tribe, humans from that time and place were hunter-gatherers living off what they could find or kill. "Humans were always on the move" Sobolik says. "They followed herds of game and ripening plants."
Though no human utters a word in the movie (Manny even jokes about the speechless tribe), humans could talk by this time. They also communicated through rock and cave art, but reading and writing were still thousands of years away.
WHERE IN THE WORLD
We're never told exactly where Ice Age takes place. But the movie does offer some clues. Mammoths ranged all across northern Europe, Asia, and North America. Sabertooths also covered much of the globe. But Diego's species--Smilodon fatalis--was native only to North and South America. So were ground sloths like Sid.
And during the last ice age, geologists know that glaciers such as those in the movie covered northern Europe, Canada, and the northern reaches of what's now the United States.
Add up all the clues, and a logical setting would be the northern Rocky Mountains or the coastal range that runs from California to Alaska.
TIME WARP
250 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Today's seven continents
were all connected.
65 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Dinosaurs became extinct.
5.5 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Oldest known human
ancestors existed.
2.6 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Earliest known
tools developed.
400,000
YEARS AGO
Homo sapiens (modern
humans) evolved.
35,000
YEARS AGO
Oldest known cave
paintings were created.
23,000
YEARS AGO
Peak of last ice age.
15,000
YEARS AGO
First humans set up
camp in North America.
13,000
YEARS AGO
Most woolly mammoths,
North American ground
sloths, and the sabertooth
species Smilodon fatalis
became extinct.
ALL DATES APPROXIMATE
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Named Works: Ice Age (Motion picture)
Source Citation
McCollum, Sean. "Ice Age: a cool guide to the new movie." National Geographic World Mar. 2002: 26+. General OneFile. Web. 10 Jan. 2010.
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