was hosted by American actor Christopher Reeve, who some years before had played the leading role in Superman.

[2][3] Jointly with Reeve's narration, the documentary shows special effects scenes which reconstruct dinosaurs and their era, along with interviews with the most famous paleontologists at the time of the documentary shooting, including Jack Horner, Robert Bakker, Phil Currie, and Dale Russell.

When the Struthiomimus eats the last egg it stole, it is then hunted and killed by a pair of Deinonychus.

The documentary also discusses the overgrowing popularity of dinosaurs, as well as the possibility of living cryptids such as the Loch Ness Monster and Mokele-mbembe.

Conceived and created by Tippett with the help of Industrial Light & Magic stop-motion animators Randy Dutra (who made the dinosaur molds and skins) and Tom St. Amand (who made the inner articulated metallic skeletons of the dinosaurs),[4] this original sequence was titled Prehistoric Beast and tried to improve go motion animation special effects techniques.

They then asked Tippett to realise new sequences with other dinosaur species, like Hadrosaurus, Deinonychus, Struthiomimus and Brontosaurus, while stock footage from the 1979 film Meteor was used to depict an asteroid, the one supposed to have crashed into the Earth, causing the dinosaur's extinction.

In 1983, when his work with the original Star Wars trilogy was finished, Tippett went on to improve his animation technique by means of Prehistoric Beast (1984).

was primarily shot in New York City and Los Angeles, and in some fossiliferous locations of the United States.

Reeve was a "Dino fan" and demonstrated his enthusiasm by flying his own airplane to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and requesting himself reshoots of several scenes.

[5] Tippett received assistance from Industrial Light & Magic stop-motion animators Randy Dutra (who made the dinosaur molds and skins) and Tom St. Amand (who made the inner articulated metallic skeletons of the dinosaurs).

One of those excerpts was a scene from King Kong (1933), in which a character pronounces the words "prehistoric beast", which is the title chosen by Tippett for his experimental short.