Animals That Were Scarier Than Dinosaurs

It's certainly no exaggeration to say that life would have been much

scarier

if the

dinosaurs

had stayed, but what if I told you that the earth used to be populated by creatures that were even meaner and more ferocious, from oversized snakes to monsters? marine and strange critters straight out of your nightmares here are some

animals

that were even

scarier

than the

dinosaurs

dunkleosteus some of the scariest creatures that ever existed were water dwellers and dunkleosteus is certainly no exception this brutal fish lived during the Late Devonian Period, which was around 370 360 million years ago and is often known as the Age of Fish, FYI, is long before dinosaurs walked the earth during an era known as Mesozoic era, approximately 245 and 66 million years ago, which scientists have divided into three periods: the Triassic and the Jurassic. and cretaceous, the 26- to 32-foot-long dunkleosteus was streamlined and shark-like, with an armored head and a face that only a mother could love because of its ferocious appearance.

You may be surprised to learn that the dunkleosteus actually lacked proper teeth, but instead, don't be fooled, it had two long bony blades that could break and crush almost anything, and I mean anything, because Dunkleosteus He definitely wasn't a picky eater, eating fish, sharks and even his own kind, his fearsome fangs continually growing and rubbing against each other as they acted like self-sharpening scissors to give you an idea of ​​how powerful his jaws were. Scientists have speculated that they could generate up to eight thousand pounds of bite force per square inch. For some perspective, a lion bite generates approximately 650 pounds per square inch.

Dunkleosteus' fatal flaw was that he was so greedy that he often suffered from indigestion. Fossils of this prehistoric beast have often been found along with regurgitated and semi-digested remains of fish. You might be glad to know that Dunkleosteus is no longer around, but if you want. To make sure that surprising you never dies, you know what to do, just move over to the Like and Subscribe buttons and show them some love. Then, don't forget to tickle that little bell icon, that way you'll be the first to do it. know when i upload more amazing content now buckle up for more goosebumps inducing helicoprion beasts if you thought entering the water with dunkleosteus was a terrifying prospect then wait until you hear about helicoprion, this gruesome 270 million year old 20 to 25 feet long The fish is the star of one of the most baffling fossil mysteries to ever confound paleontologists.

It all started with the discovery of strange petrified swirls of elongated teeth that looked like fossilized fruit roll-ups. Russian geologist Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky coined the name helicoprion in 1899. After determining that the strange fossils were actually part of a shark-like fish, his best guess was that the unusual feeding apparatus was attached to the shark's nose. long-dead creature like a permanently coiled horn, but the remains continued to baffle paleontologists for more than A century of years spent speculating about the world's true layout of teeth produced a series of strange visions of sharks with swirls of teeth. hanging from their snouts, hanging from their lower jaws, dorsal fins, caudal fins and even embedded deep in their throats, it was not like that.

Until 2013, a study led by Leif Tepanilla of Idaho State University correctly proposed that the row of rolled teeth completely filled the lower jaw in a circular saw-like formation. As the fish aged, new teeth continually formed in the back of the lower jaw while there were practically no upper teeth, so how did the helicoprion terribly catch and consume its prey? Paleontologists suggest that when the jaw closed, the swirl of teeth rotated the teeth backwards in a saw-like motion, as if all that wasn't terrifying enough. The largest telecoprion specimen ever found had a two-foot-wide jaw. Thank goodness this terrifying buzzsaw killer went extinct about 225 million years ago because they're a bunch of terrifying birds.

The simple fact that scientists dubbed them the first terrifying birds should tell you all you need. I don't want to know anything about these scary creatures, but anyway I'm going to go ahead and give you a full rundown after a meteorite wiped out fearsome dinosaurs like the T-Rex and Velociraptor, the terror bird became the main southern terrestrial predator. america a title they defended for the next 60 million years these prehistoric feathered beasts grew up to 10 feet tall and had tyrannosaurus-like feet and a hooked beak that could sever a horse's spinal cord with one fatal blow their reign The terror began before what we now know as Central America existed, when South America was still an island, while saber-toothed cats and wolves took over the job of top predators elsewhere, most mammals.

In South America they were happy herbivores, which provided the terrifying birds with a smorgasbord of plant-munching

animals

to feast on without competition. These fast-moving creatures were equipped with a beak-like beak which they used to strike down and fatally crack the skulls of smaller animals, but that's not all, their bony heads. It could act as a giant meat tenderizer and would probably have used its enormous clawed paws to take the lives of its prey during its 60 million year reign. 17 different species of the land bird family came and went until they finally disappeared completely around 2.5 million years ago.

Makes you appreciate street pigeons a little more, doesn't it? Platy Belladonne. How do you take a normal elephant and make it absolutely terrifying? Its proboscis is replaced with a huge fleshy fork. This is what this fantastic creature looks like, just as it was dreamed. by an imaginative seven-year-old, but travel back in time to between eight and twenty million years ago and you'll see for yourself that the platy nightshade was once as real as it gets. This ancestor of the modern elephant had a strange protruding jaw. which actually consisted of a pair of flared fangs, which, by the way, are just modified incisors, but what was the purpose of this strange tool?

After all, animals don't waste energy developing useless traits. When platybelladon was first described in the 1920s, its lower incisors were thought to be used for shoveling and dredging soft vegetation in aquatic or swampy environments, but in 1992 paleontologist David Lambert proposed that they were also used as weapons. scythe-like that could cut through thick vegetation instead of roaming the shores. Platy Belladon wandered through the Miocene. Asia, Africa and North America feed on land plants, grabbing branches with their trunk and cutting them with those specialized built-in scythes because these fleshy, spoon-shaped appendages don't fossilize as easily as bones, which we are very lucky to have. know a lot Fortunately, these strange creatures did us a great favor by sometimes dying en masse next to or in rivers, which are prime places for easy fossilization, although they may not have posed much of a threat to humans if they still existed Nowadays, it's safe to say. that these animals still have one of the strangest mugs in history, andrew sarchis, it's hard to imagine that something with the name andrew is in any way scarier than a dinosaur, but this ferocious creature says otherwise, although it has never been found no complete skeleton of Andrew Sarkis as part of a The skull of one of these bad boys discovered in Mongolia in 1923 measured almost a meter long.

The leader of the expedition, Roy Chapman, Andrews decided that the animal must have been a carnivore due to its enormous teeth and named it Andrew Sarkis, Mongol sister, after himself, of course, to this day. This is the only specimen ever found belonging to this terrifying species that roamed Asia between 45 and 36 million years ago during the Eocene. Paleontologists built an impression of the rest of the animal's body using knowledge of its skull and its relationship to another bear. Like a prehistoric creature called mezzanix, the result is a 16-foot-long, six-foot-tall vision of pure nightmare fuel. This heavily built, wolf-like animal walked on four short legs and had a long body and tail with hoofed legs.

It had a scary snout with big. Teeth crushing bones that could have weighed anywhere from 1,764 pounds to more than 2,200 pounds, so in case you needed more reasons to shiver in fear, this monumental size makes Andrew Sarkis the largest known mediating land mammal ever. has lived in a rather strange way through these ungulates. The beasts were actually thought to be most closely related to hippos and whales, both belonging to a larger order of mammals called artiodactyls because Andrew Sarkis is only known from a skull and a few other bones, whether he was an active predator or simply a large scavenger. to debate, but I certainly wouldn't want to risk it.

Titanoboa If you're afraid of snakes, now might be the time for a quick snack. 60 million years ago, during the Paleocene epoch, in the swampy waters of what is now Colombia, lurked the largest snake that ever existed, the titanoboa, measuring almost 50 feet long and weighing a colossal 2,500 pounds. This oversized snake weighed 10 times more than the green anaconda that rules those same grounds today, sadly, although the titanoboa never caught on. -on par with the t-rex that existed just a few million years after the fall of the dinosaurs, the titanoboa reigned over the vast swampy jungle where everything was hotter, wetter and larger than it is today, in keeping with this general theme of greatness. so big that it practically defied the laws of physics.

You will see that every living creature has evolved under the limitations of gravity. The only reason ridiculously massive creatures like the 100-foot blue whale can exist is because gravity doesn't affect giants as much. In the sea, scientists speculate that this is what the titanoboa must have taken advantage of to reach its enormous size. The creature was so large that it probably couldn't move very well on land and must have spent much of its time in water. behaving more like an anaconda that lives in water despite looking like a modern boa constrictor, you know, imagine taking a dip in the river and seeing the skin of one of these enormous beasts on the nearby shore if you're wondering what it ate the titanoboa The simple answer is whatever you saw.

The giant snake was an ambush predator and relied on its incredible strength to squeeze the life out of its prey. The Titanoboa weighed and hunted mainly large reptiles, devouring giant tortoises and even crocodiles, why and even when. Titanoboa's extinction remains a mystery, but imagine the havoc it would wreak on us puny humans if it didn't j colopterus three words giant c scorpion, bet you never thought you'd hear them together in a sentence about an animal of the real life. You will be pleased to know that the now extinct group of euryptarids, also known as sea scorpions, which belonged to the order Arthropods, were mostly small creatures about the size of a human hand, except for the nightmare-inducing jaycolopterys, which lived around of 460 million.

Years ago, during the Silurian period, this spiky sea scorpion grew up to eight feet long, making it easily the largest arthropod ever known so get a better idea of ​​what it looked like. Imagine those face-huggers from the alien franchise blown up to enormous proportions with the ability to swim thrown into their segmented, paddle-shaped body was similar to that of the strange horseshoe crab, except you know a lot more. The giant jacalopterus moved quickly underwater thanks to its paddle-like hind legs that allowed it to quickly swim after its prey along with its multiple specialized limbs, this sea monster was also equipped with enormous spring-loaded claws that it used to catching fish as they passed by a fossilized claw discovered in 2007 that even measured a whopping 18 inches across, there's no denying that if this giant sea scorpion had existed.

Today I could have used these claws to grab you in a deadly embrace andCrush your skull like an almond. The reign of the European tarids, including the terrifying jaycolopteris, finally came to a sudden end thanks to the Permian extinction around 299 to 252 million years ago. ago it wiped out over 96% of all marine life on earth phoboeromis pattersony you may have noticed that many animals in the prehistoric era were basically giant-sized versions of some of the animals that still exist today. Well, let me introduce you. For perhaps the most baffling example of that topic, Phoberomus pattersony, these real-life ratzillas were the largest rodents to ever walk the earth, measuring around 10 feet long with another five feet of tail to boot, they have been recovered remains of these repulsive rodents.

From various sites in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela over the years, although their closest living relative is the humble guinea pig, they were more similar in appearance to modern capybaras despite being much larger and heavier. Examinations of the skeletons of these spooky ratzillas suggest that they probably weighed around 800 kilograms, which is about the same size as an American bison. The hind limbs of Phoboromus patersoni were enormous compared to its thin forelimbs, suggesting that it probably rested on its haunches while feeding using smaller forelimbs to gather plant material, just as the fobermiss capybara had a deep, firm jaw and sharp front teeth that adapted to their gritty herbivorous diet, although they were herbivores, these tremendous rodents would have had foot-long incisors capable of causing serious damage if crossed.

Phoboromus towered over nearshore wetlands and marshes until they mysteriously disappeared about 8 million years ago, so the next time you squirm at the size of a rat on the street, remember that it could be a much worse hallucigenia. It's not unusual for paleontologists to have trouble figuring out what an animal looks like, especially when it's long extinct. 400 million years ago, but the case for hallucigenia was still much more difficult than In fact, most scientists studied this thumb-sized worm for more than 50 years before they could determine where its head was. Take a look at this absolutely ridiculous creature and you'll see what I mean in 1977, British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris happened.

About a strange half-inch-long fossil that had been found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies 66 years earlier had already been classified as an annelid worm that includes leeches and earthworms, but Conway Morris disagreed. his opinion with the crazy woman The organism could walk on several pairs of stilt-like spines and also had numerous tentacles emerging from its back. He called the creature hallucigenia because it was so absurd that it looked like something you'd hallucinate during a bad trip, but in 1991 researchers Lars Ramsgold and Ha Ziegwan turned Conway Morris' idea on its head—literally, what he had identified as tentacles were actually tentacles. legs of the creature, so the model was inverted.

The spines now located on the creature's back were probably used for defense. It wasn't until 2015 that further analysis was carried out by Martin Smith of the University of Cambridge using an electron microscope and samples of the Burgess shale revealed which end was the worm's head complete with not only a pair of eyes but also a large smile. smiling teeth, although scientists don't know exactly which hallucigenia ate the The ring of teeth around its mouth was probably used to suck water and food into the intestine. It may have been small, but there's no denying that this lazy hallucination is seriously disconcerting. could grow to incredible proportions, for example, Anthropleura, an eight-foot-long millipede that roamed the earth during the Late Carboniferous Period around 359 to 299 million years ago, although Anthropleura was likely herbivorous and It fed on dead plant matter like modern millipedes.

There's no denying that they were still pretty terrifying. The fossil footprints that have been discovered suggest that these enormous millipedes could move at great speed, undulating hundreds of enormous legs in a bewildering rhythm and swerving to avoid trees and other obstacles. Anthroplera were the largest land invertebrates of all time. meaning they were highly unlikely to have any natural predators, their segmented bodies were so flexible that they could probably adopt a defensive posture and look you right in the eye if they wanted to. These monumental insects became extinct shortly after the end of the Carboniferous period, when the humid climate began to dry drastically, drastically reducing the rainforests that were their natural habitat, but why don't we have such massive insects today?

Well, the leading theory is that prehistoric insects grew so large because they benefited from the excess oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. During the period in which the Anthroplera lived, the rise of vast lowland swamp forests led to atmospheric oxygen levels of around 30 percent, or almost 50 percent higher than current levels, so the next time someone says climate change isn't real, introduce them to this super-weird, oversized millipede. Mosasaurus If you're a fan of the Jurassic World movies, you may already be familiar with the Mosasaurus thanks to this incredible scene, but the thing is, the Mosasaurus isn't technically a dinosaur.

These large marine reptiles are actually closely related to snakes and monitor lizards. but that doesn't make them any less scary. This gigantic warm-blooded carnivore swam in seas around the world between 80 and 66 million years ago, although complete specimens have never been found. Paleontologists speculate that the mosasaur probably reached lengths of 45 to 50 feet and weighed about 5 and a half tons, larger than an average city bus and heavier than two adult rhinos. If you look a little closer, you'll see that the captive mosasaur from the Jurassic World movies has two extra rows of terrifying teeth inside its enormous mouth.

You might think this is just a classic example of filmmakers twisting the truth for dramatic effect, but not like modern snakes, Mosasaurus had pterygoid or fanged teeth inside its enormous jaws that were anchored to bones in the palate, these teeth that were embedded in the fleshy tissue of their gums made it easier to grab and swallow their prey underwater due to their relationship with snakes and monitor lizards such as the Komodo dragon. They may even have had huge forked tongues, but we may never know for sure because soft tissues rarely fossilize, it should be no surprise that mosasaurs were tremendously successful predators.

Stomach contents have revealed that these aquatic brutes ate ammonites, bony fish, sea turtles, other prehistoric reptiles such as the plesiosaur, and even seabirds. Its fossils have been found on every continent on Earth, even in Antarctica. They became the dominant marine predators during the Cretaceous period until the KPG extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs wiped them out too Triassic Kraken For centuries fishermen have told stories of a terrifying sea monster capable of capsizing a boat and devouring its crew , the Kraken, these huge beasts. They have appeared in their fair share of Hollywood films, but did they ever really exist?

In 1857, Danish naturalist Japetis Steenstrup examined a large washed-up squid beak measuring about three inches across and concluded that the kraken was real and then that it was some kind of giant. Since then around 21 species of giant squid have been described, each with different body parts washed ashore, these elusive creatures roamed the depths of the ocean, but it is difficult to know exactly what so large they become because whole specimens are almost never found. Some estimates suggest that the colossal squid, the largest living species known only from the beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales, could weigh up to 1,500 pounds and reach 33 feet in length.

He may not be a squid of kraken-sized proportions, but he did it. A beast that once lurked in prehistoric waters, well, Professor Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, thinks so. According to McMinnaman, there could have been huge 100-foot squid in the early Triassic period that preyed on ichthyosaurs, which were school bus-sized marine reptiles that looked a bit like modern dolphins. Mcmenamin first presented the idea in 2011 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Minneapolis. He based his hypothesis on the strange discovery of nine fossilized ichthyosaur vertebrae in Nevada arranged in linear patterns that he believes look alike.

That pattern of suction cup discs on the cephalic tentacles McMiniman referred to the fact that modern cephalopods are intelligent creatures and that octopuses are known to collect bones, shells and rocks for their lairs, but other paleontologists are not so convinced and some Critics point out that in the absence of evidence that cephalopods actually store their prey, others have even accused Mcminiman of simply reading the bones at the Nevada site as if they were prehistoric tea leaves, but in 2013 McMinneman returned to the Nevada site. and discovered another fossil, this time a fragment which he believes to be the tip of a huge beak belonging to a Triassic kraken.

Unfortunately the unidentified fossil is too fragmentary to prove the size of the cephalopod to which it may have belonged, while there certainly are little evidence of a truly monstrous squid alive today mcminiman's theory suggests that there is reason to believe that squid reached stupendous sizes in the distant past and when we consider that only five percent of the vast ocean has been explored so far, it is very It's possible that something much bigger and scarier than the giant squid once lurked just beyond human reach. If you were to bring one of these prehistoric horrors back from the dead, which one would they choose?

Let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching, guys.