Originally, the story was rumored to involve Manny, Sid, Diego, Ellie, and Scrat frozen solid, and accidentally defrosted in a museum in present day.
Captain Gutt is a Gigantopithecus Blacki, a prehistoric ape similar to orangutans which, based on fossil evidence, may have stood 9.8 feet (three meters) tall and weighed 1,190 pounds (540 kilograms).
Peter DeSève designed several animals for the movie that never made it to the final cut: eohippus (prehistoric horses), a large horse-like animal that the hyraxes would have ridden, a giant squid, and several prehistoric sharks, that would have nearly eaten Granny, in the scene in which she takes a bath in the ocean.
When the water surrounding the island of Scratlantis sinks into the Earth, forming North America, a snippet of Samuel A. Ward's "America the Beautiful" sounds.
When on the iceberg ship, Sid says "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink". This is from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798.