"and, strictly speaking, he's not supposed to exist yet..."Ice Age 3: Dawn on the Dinosaurs is about to leap onto our cinema screens. We check out the Ice Age movies and extract those little nuggets of trivia that make the series such a success....

• Many of the animal species shown in the Ice Age films never actually lived in the same areas, let alone the same time periods.
   
• James Earl Jones and Ving Rhames were originally considered to play Manny the mammoth.
   
• The drawings of characters during the end credit roll - and Sid's drawing of himself on a wall - were all done by the children of the animators.
   
• Comedian Denis Leary - who provides the voice of sabre-toothed tiger Diego - has been accused of stealing his act from the late Bill Hicks.
   
• Seann William Scott - the voice of Crash the opossum in Ice Age 2 & 3 - was first spotted in an advert for Sunny Delight.
   
• American talk show host Jay Leno provides the voice of giant armadillo Fat Tony.
   
• Apparently the living creature with the greatest similarity to Scrat is the Laotion rock rat.
   
• Blue Sky Studios - who have made all the Ice Age films - were formed by artists and technicians who had previously worked on Disney's Tron.
   
• Denis Leary also provided voicework for the aggressive ladybug in the animated children's outing Bug's Life.
   
• In Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Scrat meets a ladyfriend - Scratte, voiced by Karen Disher.
   
• Ray Romano - who provides the voice of Manny the mammoth - stars Everybody Loves Raymond, a record-breaking American TV show with a $3bn turnover.
   
• Queen Latifah, who voices Ellie the mammoth, was the first female rapper to be nominated for an Academy Award.
   
• British actor Simon Pegg makes his Ice Age debut as dinosaur-hunting weasel Buck.
   
• There have been at least four "Ice Ages" in the Earth's geological past, the first one taking place 2.3bn years ago.
   
• When Sid, Manny, Diego and the baby are walking through the ice cave the toddler delivers the Vulcan hand salute from Star Trek.
   
• Mammoths, which are closely related to modern elephants, lived from the Pliocene epoch from around 4.8 million to 4,500 years ago.
   
• The director behind Ice Age - Chris Wedge - also made the animated adventure Robots starring Ewen McGregor and Robin Williams.
   
• All the actors were encouraged to improvise as much as possible to help keep the animation spontaneous.
   
• Real sabre-toothed tigers (or more correctly, cats) could grow incisors - maxillary canines - up to half a metre long.
   
• After seeing a documentary about sloths, John Leguizamo tried 30 different voices for Sid and settled on the one that sounds like he's storing food in his mouth.