[TVTrope Warning] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarthAllAlong

Not quite what you are looking for, but the Malazan series has some stories spanning extremely large time scales through which multiple intelligent species evolve into existence and fade away.

It is by far, the best series I've read. Book 1 is hard to get into, and doesn't reward the reader as much, but stick with the series. It's worth it.

Stephen Erikson is an anthropologist and archaeologist which explains a lot of the deep historical depth to MBotF. Apparently he went on a dig in Mongolia between books nine and ten and almost died from a stomach bug and then a spider bite!

> And there was even a fear of dying before I could finish it! I remember being struck by a quote I read somewhere, when Robert Jordan was in his last few years, at a signing where he signed a book for an elderly woman who expressed a fear of her dying before he finished the series. And of course the bitter irony being Jordan himself dying before he could finish the series. And the closer I got to it, there was a disastrous decision to do some archaeology in Mongolia between books nine and ten, and then that almost killing me, from a stomach bug, and then a spider bite, it just started getting ridiculous. And then I realised if I keeled over in Mongolia between book nine and ten, wherever my gravestone was in the world people would annually piss on it, so I thought okay, I got to get this thing finished. And came back, I was living in Falmouth at the time, so I came back to Cornwall and just wrote my ass off and got it done.

[Spoiler Alert:] Original 1968 “Planet of the Apes”? It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.

> It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.

Dialog is present and very famous, though. ("You maniacs! You blew it up!")

I’d argue that those lines were mysterious until the subsequent closing shot that functions as the visual punch line. At least ten-year-old me didn’t get the earlier hints.

The whole series of movies (well, the pre-2000 iterations) was recently free to watch on YouTube. They're all cheesy but the original one holds up reasonably well.

Feels like a movie-length version of a classic Twilight Zone episode, which makes sense, considering Rod Serling wrote the first draft of the film's script.

You mean besides Planet of the Apes?

Not a planet of the apes traveler trope, but in his “book of the new Sun” trilogy Gene Wolfe leaves it as an exercise for the reader to figure out that it’s set in a far-far future South America.

what are the clues for south america. The river?

The hints are pretty sparse because Severian doesn’t know where he is any more than the reader does, but Wolfe confirmed it in an interview here: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm

But yeah the river is a big hint. The Paraná in Argentina is a good candidate, and it’s easy to rule out other big delta rivers like the Nile or Mississippi. Iirc Severian also uses the word “pampas” for plains, and at some point we learn there’s a jungle zone to the north, with an arid region beyond.

In Doctor Who, one of the Series 12 (2020) stories had that twist, and what stands this story apart from almost all other uses of this trope is that the twist was not an ending, and we see how characters process that reveal.

Please be careful if you gonna read TV tropes page linked in a sibling comment, as the title of that episode is in the list of examples on that page in Live-Action TV section, so you can accidentally spoil yourself all the fun.

You might want to check out the Time Odyssey series. It was written by Arthur C Clarke (along with Stephen Baxter) and deals with similar themes.

Land of the Lost. I suggest the Wil Farrell movie version.