The large format camera has taken filmgoers to nearly every corner of the planet. In "Titans of the Ice Age," it focuses on the frozen landscapes of the Ice Age and the now-extinct creatures who lived there. The film travels 20,000 years back in time to the Pleistocene Epoch, when mammoths and other long-gone species walked the Earth.

The film opens today at Carnegie Science Center’s Omnimax Theater.

Filmed in high definition and in 3-D — although the Omnimax version is 2-D — “Titans” brings this vanished world to life, delivering a solid sense of what a living, breathing mammoth and saber-toothed cat might have looked like.

Locations include the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone National Park and Alaska, which provide a real world equivalent of the frozen Pleistocene world of ice and glaciers. Placed against this backdrop are a cast of convincing computer-generated simulations of the animal who once lived there.

The challenge for the effects crew was to create anatomically accurate animals with natural motion and appearances. The CGI effects are often impressive, especially the mammoths’ fur, breathing and movements.

One central character is Lyuba, a mummified female baby wooly mammoth that was uncovered in the melting Siberian permafrost in 2007. It's one of the most intact mammoths ever discovered. Another is Zed, a male Columbian mammoth found near the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles in 2008. We also meet other Ice Age critters, including the now-extinct saber-toothed cat, Shasta ground sloth and dire wolf.

One of the film’s more memorable sequences is a fight between two male mammoths. Others show how these animals met horrible deaths trapped in tar pits or hot springs. “Titans” visits some of these sites today to show how much they’ve yielded in the way of a fossil record of Ice Age life.

The film ponders why and how these giants went extinct and what may have led to their demise: How climate change altered the food chain and destroyed habitats, how human hunters reduced their numbers and how gradual warming finally ended the Ice Age.

Finally,”Titans” draws parallels to today, as the Earth's temperature continues to rise and other species, including elephants, tigers and polar bears, experience a similar version of habitat loss — implying that we could still learn a lot from a long-gone world.

Adrian McCoy: amccoy@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1865.

First Published: January 16, 2015, 5:00 a.m.