Giant Ice-Age-Era Sloths Loved Eating "Cannonball Fruit", And You Can Too

“Well, why not call it The Big Chill? Or the Nippy Era? I’m just saying, how do we know it’s an Ice Age?” “Because of all the ice!” That’s the interaction between two Macrauchenia that kicks off Ice Age, everybody’s favorite squirrel-led foray into the Pleistocene. It touches on an interesting point, really, because although the Ice Age is famous for its ice, Earth still had vast forests, grasslands, and deserts – landscapes you can see in action in Apple TV's upcoming Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age.

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“The ice is only in the extreme north and the extreme south,” scientific advisor on the series, palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish, told IFLScience. “There are tropical and subtropical and temperate zones throughout the whole of the Ice Age, even at the height of the coldest bits.”

That’s why, in a show you might reasonably be expecting to see fluffy animals like the woolly mammoth, we also get to see a giant ground sloth that is practically hairless. Yes, enter Eremotherium – an Ice Age giant for whom “giant” really doesn’t seem to cover it.

“There's an argument as to how hairy they were,” says Naish. “Were they thickly furred, or were they naked-skinned, or were they somewhere in between? We had to make a judgment call on that [in the show] based on the evidence that we're familiar with.”

As a recent study starring Yuka the baby mammoth demonstrated, we do sometimes get to see exactly what Ice Age animals looked like when they thaw out of the permafrost. Others we have to make educated estimations based on the fossil record, and for some we can get a really good look at because – as Naish mentioned – they’re still around today.

This is true of the bizarre fruit Eremotherium can be seen eating in the series, the very cannonball-like fruit of the cannonball tree. Said to smell a bit like a skunk, its blueish-white flesh is edible (albeit met with mixed reviews) and eaten to this day where it grows in Central and South America.

“The Ice Age is actually so recent,” said Naish. “It ended 11,700 years ago. That means that, with a few exceptions, everything alive today is in the Ice Age, including us.”

So, who’s for some cannonball fruit?

The five-part series Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age will be available on Apple TV on November 26, 2025.