We think we know big cats pretty well, don’t we? Well actually, we don’t.

In this unprecedented series, recent scientific discoveries shed new light on the extraordinary prehistory of big cats and their ascent to world domination. How did these giant carnivores survive the ice age extinctions that wiped out the sabretooths, and persist into the present day? When we learn that the jaguar was once found in UK, the tiger ranged from Siberia to Turkey, and the lion, far from being African was a true worldwide phenomenon, it’s clear our view of cats has been blinkered. What happened? Brand-new night vision systems, super slow-motion cameras, and cutting-edge computer-generated imagery of a bygone age take us on a tantalising trail of evidence to answer these questions, revealing incredible and surprising stories of the world’s most charismatic predators: the big cats.