My whole family loved this series. My 8 year old daughter in particular; she has now told us that wants to be a vet *and* an archaeologist and "dig up bones like Nigel." It shows the fascination that this show holds for people; particularly children.

Yes, the animals are CGI for the most part, with the odd bit of animatronics, but even for those of us who have seen movies like 'Jurassic Park' this still seems more realistic; particularly with Nigel discussing the various creatures he sees. His educational technique is very good, as he obviously teaches without people feeling they're being bored with facts and figures.

We have the DVD now as well, which my daughter is in danger of wearing out. I only hope they make more of this brilliant show, as it was so good.

What a brilliant series. I can not believe its finished. I pray they do another series soon. I have a little boy, he is 3 and loves the show so much we had to buy the DVD for the series the day it came out in the shops. He has a great love for Dinosaurs and now even knows all the cast by name. The DVD has a few extras on it. I only wish the making of it had been a little longer . Its amazing how much we both learnt about our changing planet from the time when there was no grass to the first man. I even forgot that they were not real, especially with Martha the mammoth. I fell in love with her. the effects are brilliant. they have come along way since Jurassic park. All the cast are great, bob had me in stitches all the time. Well done ITV Saturdays wont be the same until it returns.

So I have read a few reviews, checked out some comments and have decided everyone else is wrong and no not what they talk about. OK, thats a bit much but I'll explain what I mean (And yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion).

First I acknowledge there are problems with the plot - he doesn't explain why he chooses the moment dinosaurs died to first travel back to in order to catch a T-Rex. He does constantly talk about running out of time, yet he can time travel repeatedly, but it doesn't effect my scoring because this show is made for kids.

Unlike most dinosaur CGI shows that I have seen Prehistoric Park attempts to show Dinosaurs in a different light - they are not depicted as evil, it isn't all about blood a guts and it has the odd funny moments the whole family will laugh at.

In my opinion the CGI was brilliant, I have seen dinosaurs I never even knew existed in this show and, in Australia at least, it was played on a main stream station allowing the educational sections to reach a lot more children then anything on at 6 pm on a weekend on ABC ever will.

This show is fun, you feel for the dinosaurs and more importantly they make an effort to show the relation between todays animals and the dinosaurs throughout the ages. If your kid likes giant lizards, they will love this show. This is coming from a person who detests children's programs. It really is entertaining and educational, give it a try!

OK heres the dillio. This show is the bomb. It shows amazing CGI effects and good , slightly over-done acting. I love it. If you don't get the show torrent it. I found five episodes , the sixth should be up in a few days. Many people say that this is a rip-off of Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts. Interesting theory but no. This show was done by the makers of the Walking with series. Some of the animals had a makeover ( phorusracus , meganeura) but some are the same (mammoth , arthropleura , giant scorpion , etc.). This show follows Nigel Marvin who also played himself in two other walking with specials (The Giant Claw , Land of Giants , Chased by Sea Monsters) . So , if you can stand the overacting give this show a watch.

PS. BOB ROCKS!!!

This serial is one the best of its kind. You learn much about dinosaurs and the prehistoric age, as well as you have a lot of fun! The animation is very good, except for some times when it's not so good... The story of the serial is about the man, Nigel, and his park crew that travels back in time to the prehistoric age to rescue some of the dinosaurs and other animals from extinction. But for every animal Nigel saves, there are three problems in the park that needs solving. And what happens when the animals starts attack each other? How can Nigel and his crew solve these problems? Follow them in this world exiting serial!

All in all, it's a good serial with lots of good characters and special effects!

Yes it is rather silly, but it does have a great concept. I was not expecting another Walking With Dinosaurs, which is one of the best documentaries I have ever watched in my life, but Preehistoric Park is a lot of fun. I really like David Jason, and while he has done better, he does a good job as narrator. Nigel Marvin is also really entertaining, he is very likable and clearly has a lot of enthusiasm for this. As well as being introduced to these wonderful dinosaurs, the special effects I thought were mind blowing, the T Rex especially was exceptionally well done. I also really liked the music. Overall, Prehistoric Park was silly but my sister and I learnt quite a lot and loved it all the same. 8/10 Bethany Cox

I hate how there is shows like this with absolutely no info. Here is some info on the show.

The six-part series. two years in the making. follows naturalist Nigel Marven as he travels back in time to rescue exotic creatures from the brink of extinction.

CGI technology is employed. to create the animals, which range from the T Rex to woolly mammoths and a dinosaur-eating crocodile.

Narration is provided by David Jason. It appears to be a British made show.

The show started airing in 2006.

Check it out!!

With an excellent blending of computer graphics and live action filming this series brings dinosaurs to life in a way no other series has. The combination of anthropology and current day zoology makes for an enlightening look into the lives of dinosaurs. Our 5 year old son absolutely loves Prehistoric Park and watches each of the 6 currently available episodes repeatedly. Prehistoric Park has replaced Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Curious George and all his other cartoon favorites. It's all he wants to watch. All I can say is, Thank You TiVo. Without it my son would not be able to get his daily dose of Prehistoric Park. He constantly asks me to check the website to see if another episode is finally available. Even his older brothers ages 13 and 10 find this series interesting and eagerly await a new episode featuring another prehistoric animal whether dinosaur or ice age mammal. As for the adults in the family, we find the antics of Nigel and his staff as entertaining as the dinosaurs. Admittedly there are some parts that will make the more mature roll his or her eyes but that is also part of the charm of the show and what draws the younger viewers.

The series is educational, interesting and funny. I got the box set and i enjoy watching it. Alomst everyone in my family does, we have not had the disk that long but it has already been watched millions of times, and I'm surprised it hasn't broken. Each episode focuses on a different time so no matter which part of the prehistoric history you are interested in, it will be there with plenty of fun clips and facts. Another bonus is that the animation is excellent and at times believable. As well as facts there is a story with each one, sometimes sad and sometimes scary. For anyone this is a great series and well worth watching!

After seen the Jurassic World I felt a bit disappointed, because it was a simple cash cow in order to take money and I felt it is time to remind to the world the true successor of the Jurassic Park, the mini series of 2006, Prehistiric Park. The concept is silly, but the execution was great. The story goes like that, in the present day Nigel Marven and his team has made a park in order to accommodate excited creatures, which they bring back from the time those were going extinct. The idea is like a cross between Back to the Future and Jurassic Park ,but the crew and its reaction in the way the story works is almost perfectly and the manner they try to find by which way the animal will react by comparing them with the modern day counterparts is great, because for example, either you live in modern day, the Ice Age, the Mesozoid Era or the Carboniforous a top predator is a top predator and its other characteristics, like environment,class or even anatomy are secondary. In the end the only drawbacks the series had was the CGI for two or three animal ,it is was a bit a sword thump and its short length, after the end of the sixth and last episode you crave for more and unfortunately the satisfaction never comes, boomer! Anyway I still like it and recommended for the dinosaur enthusiast and followers of Jurassic Park and for real Mr Marven you have a thing on going back in time, I think that is a bit of a bad habit for a homo sapiens, If you really want to travel trough time just team up with the Doctor(ha ha ha ha !!) he will be as excited as you and even more.

"Prehistoric Park" is a paleontological gift from the gods. Don't listen to those fussy nitpickers that condemn it as an ersatz "Jurassic Park" clone. First of all, the various endangered, ancient beasts are NOT cloned. They are rescued from perilous time periods by the charismatic and engrossing zoologist and adventurer Nigel Marvin, a somewhat more subdued version of the late, lamented "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin. Second, not all the captured beasts are dinosaurs and reptiles. Yes, T-rex makes his obligatory appearance, but we also witness bizarre creatures like a 10-foot tall, flightless, carnivorous bird (Phorusracos), a woolly rhino the size of a modern elephant with a 6 1/2 long horn (Elasmotherium), and a 10-foot long millipede (Arthropleura). Third, the creatures are allowed to and even encouraged to breed, as the Ornithomimus chicks demonstrate. Finally, not every creature encountered is captured. For example, we get to see the giant cave bear, the Parasaurolophus, and the rhinoceros-like Toxodon undisturbed in their natural environments.

Instead, this series puts a prehistoric (and sometimes gently humorous) twist on the daily activities and challenges in maintaining a natural-habitat wildlife park. Nigel and his appealing, competent cast, such as groundskeeper Bob and Suzanne the veterinarian provide detailed but fascinating information on the feeding, boarding, and medical care of disparate animal groups. The actual forays in the past are even more fascinating and gripping as Nigel and his crew deal not only with dangerous, deadly animals but also perilous natural disasters like, say, the approaching asteroid which decimated the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous, and odorless carbon monoxide, and a swamp fire during the Carboniferous period. Yes, Nigel has a time travel portal to visit those bygone eras, and yes, some people might have a problem with the time travel paradoxes which inevitably follow. To me, they were an insignificant distraction. The series seems episodic, but you can't really watch the 3-DVD set at random because there are linear threads running through it. Two of the main ones are the increasing sibling rivalry between the troublesome T-Rexes Terence and Matilda, and the living adjustments endured by the wounded, long-suffering, and ultimately heroic woolly mammoth Martha.

The series has exciting cliffhangers, but they are natural and unforced. Will Terence survive Matilda's attack? Will Martha heal and be accepted by the elephant herd? Will the male and female Smilodons breed successfully? Will Nigel get himself and his 4 X 4 out of the Carboniferous swamp before the fire strikes? Will Nigel's scorpion sting do permanent damage? Can anything stop the spooked, stampeding titanosaur from reducing the park to rubble? It's also fun to see the depiction of how animals from different eras might react to each other, such as when Martha is introduced to a real elephant herd, and when the crocodile Deinosuchus tries to take a bite out of the escaped Matilda, and when Martha attempts to protect a baby elephant from, again, Matilda; the CGI in this regard is sensational, and is seamlessly top-notch in general.

Also, in general, if you are a nature, paleontology, or wildlife buff, you will be in heaven with this series. "Prehistoric Park" may also give conservation-minded people comfort, of a sort, by kinda cheating extinction and bringing a mind-blowing array of creatures back to life for our contemplation.

This series is definitely the most entertaining on TV after the end of Dr who season 2. In a world full of reality TV trash, it's good to see a TV show with some effort put into it! This series is far from perfect- the effects are lesser to those of Jurrassic park and walking with dinosaurs even though they are 13 and 7 years old! And it doesn't have that 'wow' factor that the other two had. Maybe this is because of it's odd docu-style format. The title is a complete rip-off they could have come up with a more original name, couldn't they?! After just seeing 1 episode, i'd give it 8 out of 10. I'm deducting points because it's a bit of a rip off. But i'm sad that there won't be a second series until at least 2008. I was thinking i would be disappointed by this show because of the common and annoying amount of adverts ITV has injected onto us-- and i wasn't. :) :D

I saw this on Sunday and was amazed by the CGI. I liked how in the first episode, Nigel went back in time to the Cretaceous in Montana and brought back a Triceratops, a flock of Ornithomimus, and two juvenile tyrannosaurs back to Prehistoric Park. I also liked the second episode in which Nigel went back to the ice age. I could not believe how fast the cave bear was going when it was chasing him. The other scene where Nigel was being chased by the Elasmotherium was kind of freaky because I thought he was going to get impaled by that horn. I really look forward to seeing the other episodes of Prehistoric Park when they get shown on Animal Planet.

It is quite a unique approach - trying to convert Jurassic Park into a pseudo-documentary, and on the whole it does work quite well.

For a start, more animals are "met", than in the aforementioned film, and whilst that had multi-million dollar special effects, the ones in this series are still pretty good.

Whilst it can be slow at times, and some of the dialog can be a bit stilted and a bit cheesy, Nigel does make the program interesting and describes the animals in an interesting way.

I do have some technical problems with it though, mainly : They assume that the vegetation that we have now would be suitable. It also seems they wont have enough for all the animals (from the ground views that we've had).

The pens are made out of wood - and don't look terribly strong either. After all, if a T-Rex can cause havoc with metallic cages, what would 2 T-Rex's do with wooden pens ? Perhaps in the last episode, everyone & everything gets eaten :) Nigel doesn't have any weapons, which is a bit stupid...

Who owns the park, and where does the money come from - there are no visitors... Perhaps its InGen ?!

Sometimes the presentation seems a bit contrived, especially with the park manager.

Having said that, it is a refreshing brainstorm come to life that combines paleo-documentary, science fiction and the best of modern computer technology.

The other tantalizing feature is that it is a coming out for many prehistoric animals - that most of the population have not heard of. The woolly mammoth, T-Rex and the like have been used and abused and discussed and rediscussed. Putting these less known creatures in the spotlight will hopefully revive public interest in times long gone and re-captivate our imagination.

To sum it up: even if some of it seems a little cheesy, look past it and a whole new world will open up to you.

It's such a pity it was a 6 part because if they made a season 2 this would've been a must watch!

My kids absolutely adored this movie! They couldn't stop watching it! I remember them walking around town like they were pretending to be t-rexes! I was absolutely embarrassed but was it worth it? Dang right it is! How did this not receive the award it got nominated for

Following in the prehistoric footsteps of 'Chased by Dinosaurs', creator/producer Time Haines has brought Nigel Marvin back for a new program, of prehistoric safari. Six episodes, and dozens of new creatures, Prehistoric Park, takes things one step further (or at least it promises to). In the end it takes one step backwards, and here is why.

This series is more focused on show than science, and it goes a little over the top, occasionally reaching a level of gimmicky. Nigel Marvin and his team are setting up a Jurrasic Park kind of Facility. Using a time portal, Marvin intends to go back in time to various points in prehistory and return with creatures that are endangered at those time periods.

If you are not bothered by the absurdity, you will certainly find the program cute, but it can be equally annoying at times. When Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park, he claimed that he wanted to show animals, not monsters. Prehistoric Park takes that a step further. The creatures we see are not merely treated like animals, they are treated like pets! From wrestling games with a Triceratops to a Mammoth haircut, I doubt if anyone will find this program as awe inspiring as its 'Walking with' predecessors. What is most annoying however is the decision to throw in a narrator. Totally unnecessary, It ruins the Cinema Verité factor, making the program feel even more artificial.

Despite error, Prehistoric Park is entertaining simply because it never takes itself seriously. Even if it doesn't do justice to prehistoric life, it is a feel good, quirky kind of program, that kids as well as adults can enjoy.

"It's one thing to find a T-Rex," the narrator David Jason tells us. "It's another thing to take one home." Prehistoric Park takes the fascinating idea of a natural history series on dinosaurs and combining it into a fictional documentary with a real wildlife adventurer named Nigel Marven. Nigel uses a time portal to travel back with a small team to capture or trick dinosaurs in order to return with them through the portal to today's Prehistoric Park. This is an idea that is presented with good science, but is engrossingly odd because it's played so straight. It's hard not to keep smiling at what has led us to this since Marlin Perkins and Wild Kingdom.

The series has terrific production values, exciting situations, deadpan delivery and this outstanding, enthusiastic real-life naturalist, Nigel Marven. He's a producer and star of popular British TV natural history programs and was associated with David Attenborough for several years. From the back wearing a bush hat he resembles Andrew Zimern rushing to eat something we don't want to know about. From the front, however, he resembles somewhat a weathered and energetic Rod Taylor, down to his workingman's accent. Nigel Marven is a completely unself-conscious amateur actor in the middle of all the special effects. This integration of live action and impeccable Computer Generated Imagery is what CGI was born to do, not waste its time on comic book movies. The fight between two T-Rexes, one with two babies looking on and Nigel trying to stay out of the way, is far more exciting than the fights between Spidey and Willem Defoe. The CGI visuals with the explanation of the giant meteor strike that most likely led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs is impressive. Nigel and the two hungry T-Rex babies, now orphans that he coaxed through his portable time portal with a sandwich, had only seconds to spare before the meteor hit.

During the six episodes of approximately 50 minutes each we'll get to know and like Nigel, as well as Prehistoric Park's head keeper, Bob (Rod Arthur) and the Park's veterinarian, Suzanne (Suzanne McNabb). Of course we'll also see Triceratops horridus, Omithomimus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Mammuthus primigenius, Elasmotherium, Smilodons, Phorusrhacos, and...uh...a lot more. The titles of the six episodes let us know what Nigel and his time portal are up against: T-Rex Returns, Mammoth, Dino-Birds, Saving the Sabre-Tooth, The Bug House, and Giant Croc. During the episodes we often switch back to Prehistoric Park to see how Bob, Suzanne and the staff deal with everything from giving a mammoth a haircut to cool her down during a heat wave to doing an ultrascan to check for a dinosaur pregnancy. Take the time to watch this series, especially if you have kids to sit next to you on the sofa. I think you'll get a kick out of Prehistoric Park while you all learn some good, interesting stuff.

This is a great show for kids. They'll be sure to find it entertaining, and a lot of good information is given to them in a way that doesn't just ram it all down their throats straight from a book. Nigel's "mistakes" actually are a vehicle for giving that information, I believe, though, as I'm about to lay-out below, some of the mistakes are just plain ridiculous to make.

To that end, for the grownups, there are a few plot-holes that can become a bit distracting. If Nigel and his crew can time-travel to an exact, specific time and place repeatedly, wouldn't it be better to go back in time first to just look and see what you have to deal with, film everything you see with a timer running, then go back to the present and figure out a strategy, and THEN go back to your scene a second time and catch the dinosaurs, already KNOWING where they'll be and what they'll do? They will arrive in the exact same circumstances you saw the first time, and do exactly the same things. This method will eliminate ALL of your guesswork. I mean...really!! If you can figure out a way to time-travel, shouldn't you have enough brains to do something like this to make your hunting and capturing easier?

Other little things are annoying, too. No one would set up camp in the middle of an open space with T-rex presumed nearby! No one would walk around in a place he KNOWS to be a T-rex lair and be completely defenseless, with no weapons of any kind! No one, having just been chased by no less than THREE T-rex adults, would be "only slightly nervous and out of breath" as Nigel is! Yikes!! Most people would have had a full blown heart attack (I'm SURE I would have!), yet Nigel almost seemed to enjoy the romp...and then, later on, he goes blithely walking around in their lair, totally unarmed! He reacts in similar fashion on other episodes when he is dealing with dangerous bears, sabretooth cats, etc. That's just too much!

In the scenario on the show, Nigel is deliberately going to get the T-rex just when they will be wiped out by the asteroid anyway, so he wouldn't need to worry about altering history and possibly changing the fate of the ecosystem. Therefore, he wouldn't have to scruple about killing them to save himself in an emergency (he could, as already noted, always bail out back to the present and then try again with a better plan, and they'd be alive again!). No one would cage the pair of T-rex in a wooden enclosure, especially when it is the flimsy set up one finds on the show!). No one would let a small herd of titanosaurs roam the entire park at will; not only is it dangerous, they'll eventually blunder into all of the buildings and wreck them, not to mention crash through the T-rex and sabretooth enclosures and inadvertently "liberate" these dangerous animals! No one would cavalierly wade through Carboniferous period swamps as carelessly as Nigel does. Even when he gets a bite to the leg, he's almost totally unconcerned about the bacteria in the bite that are completely different from present-day bacteria and TOTALLY foreign to our immune systems. Speaking of bacteria (and viruses), no one explains how the beasts brought back to the present can so successfully fight off the germs of our own day; they'd be as completely defenseless here as we should be in their time.

Finally, how, exactly, does Nigel know the PRECISE day that the asteroid hit, ending the Cretaceous Period and wiping out the dinosaurs??? He couldn't possibly guess to within 10,000 years! The dating isn't anywhere near precise enough to travel to the very day such an event occurred! I could name a few more quibbles with the show, but you get the idea.

Still, as I said, the show is a pretty good "adventure" for the kids, and it's fairly entertaining for those adults who don't want to think much while viewing. For the rest, it can also be entertaining, but not always in the ways the producers intended, I'm sure! ;-)

The ITV have been making a big ordeal about the new programme "Prehistoric Park" with various adverts on the tele, BUT it was a bit of a disappointment. Even though it was a very imaginative story and i could imagine myself if i was just 10 years younger (as I'm 15) that i would think this programme to be a real nature programme, it wasn't as good as i expected.

One of the big mistakes they made was that they played "Jurassic Park" before it! A blockbuster film which paid millions for the special effects of the dinosaurs alone and then we switch to a rather expensive for a television programme with fairly good effects but from seeing a two hour long Dinosaur film didn't give the effects of "Prehistoric Park" the credit they needed.

I would advice to watch it if they bring it out on DVD but just DON'T WATCH JURASSIC PARK BEFORE IT!Big Mistake...

This program was show here in Australia right before another program "The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs" was show on another channel. The latter actually had serious, interesting stuff to say along with all the pretty CGI, and certainly made this show seem rather insipid. Even after accepting the device of time-travel, this quasi-documentary doesn't hold up high in the credibility stakes. Waist-high wooden fences? Really.

Still, for pre-teens, this ought to hold the attention, with the novelty of the palaeontologist dodging the big creatures, and throwing in a sprinkling of prehistoric factoids. Nothing revolutionary, however.

After watching Walking With Dinosaurs i wanted more. Then came this! Its the same thing but he brings the dinosaurs to a park! Sadly a lot of things brought it down. Nigil was very annoying and unrealistic. Every single episode he has to bring a new dinosaurs back to the park. What bothered me was that every time he does this it turns out to be the most dramatic and unbelievable adventure with way to much comedy. And it was a little bit Hollywood.

Acting and special effects were med core.

This will be great for kids. Great for simple ppl who have not seen walking with dinosaur's and basically don't no any thing about dinosaur's.

But for more realistic viewers its not to good.

Throughout these series of programs I had the strangest feeling that I was watching episodes of Blue Peter (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051257/). I kept expecting Auntie Val Singleton to spring out from behind a tree advising you "not to try this at home".

Having never been a David Jason fan I had a few qualms about the voice-over but agree with a previous contributor that the timbre of Jason's voice does not work very well for narration. (Sorry Del-boy.) Most of the budget of this production was obviously allocated to the CGI. The only "actor" who feigned any real interest was Marven with his matter-of-fact and, at times very relaxed, attitude about potentially risking his life among prehistoric carnivorous beasts - most of which would have seen him as a tasty morsel of protein to supplement their meagre diets.

I admit that it must be difficult acting for Green-Screen but everyone else appeared to be either confused or displaying tongue-in-cheek humour about what was happening which didn't help with the credibility.

Final analysis - fun for the kids to watch.

I guess it contains some useful info about dinosaurs, but seriously this idiot would be dead within 2 minutes of going back in time. Do you seriously think anyone with half a brain would take a plastic dinghy down a croc infested river (many times the size of todays croc's) and survive. Does anyone really believe they would then be able to catch one of these monsters with a few wooden poles and some rope. Not to mention walking through the forest unarmed and by yourself, and then stating Im really worried about this particular dinosaur as we have already seen a couple and they hunt in packs, obviously not to worried or you might take a few precautions. Then we have the park itself were the fences are all made of wood which most of the dinosaurs present would break in half without even trying. Then we have the ridiculous case of this 50 odd year old guy and one of his workers of the same age outrunning a T Rex over a few hundred metres. Seriously they wouldn't have got more then a few metres. Then to top it off in many cases they only bring one animal of a species back, didn't anyone explain the birds and the bees to this guy. This is only basically one episode I've talked about but I imagine the other 5 are much the same. This program is absolute crap, they should have just don't a documentary on all the prehistoric animals instead of this rubbish.