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Today’s world is full of terrifying animals. But no matter how fear inducing some of the animals that we
have today, they can’t compare to most animals who have long since been gone from this world. Based
on fossil records, we have come to know how terrifyingly ferocious some of them have been. Whether
on land, in the air, or at sea, no place is safe during prehistoric times. Today we will look at ten terrifying
animals you will be glad are already extinct. Make sure you stay until the end of the video, as number 1
is truly the stuff of nightmares.
Number 10. Dunkleosteus
Living around 360 million years ago, Dunkleosteus was one of the largest – and one of the last – of a
group of fish called the arthrodires. These fish had thick, bony plates covering their skulls, and with a full
body length of up to six meters, the armored head gear of the largest Dunkleosteus fossils are positively
nightmarish. New fossil research shows that, as full-grown adults, these top predators had jaws strong
enough to take down just about anything in their habitat – even each other.
Dunkleosteus did not have true teeth; instead, the skull's bony plates extended into sharpened "fangs"
in front of the mouth. These fangs scraped together, continuously sharpening each other as the fish
opened and closed its jaws. As these monstrous fish grew up, their mouths changed. The jaws gradually
lengthened, while the fangs up front grew sturdier. This meant the jaws of an adult closed more slowly,
but with a lot more power. While the younger fish were eating smaller, softer prey, the adults were
capable of punching through even other heavily armored prey.
Number 9. Helicoprion
Helicoprion was a bizarre creature that went extinct some 225 million years ago. Like modern-day
sharks, Helicoprion had cartilaginous bones rather than calcified ones, so the only traces it left in the
fossil record were weird, whorl-like spirals of teeth that look quite unlike anything sharks sport today.
When Helicoprion bit down on prey, the tooth whorl would have been forced backward, slicing and
dicing the meal and moving it down toward the throat, think of it as something like a food processor
with a direct route down to the animal’s throat. Few Helicoprion fossils show signs of tooth breakage,
and no, it’s not because they had good dental hygiene. According to scientists, it’s more than likely that
they prefer dining on soft-bodies animals such as squid. Lucky these things went extinct before humans
came about, it’s not hard to imagine one of these just munching down on some swimmers soft and juicy
thigh.
Number 8. Arthropleura
If bugs give you the chills, just imagine what a 2-meter-long bug will do to you.
Arthropleura is a contender for the biggest arthropod of all time, but what is it actually? Well, imagine a
centipede but larger, way larger. The biggest fossil found was 2.6 meters long. It lived during the
Carboniferous period,
All fossils unearthed of this species were always incomplete, and because the mouth of Arthropleura has
never been recovered it has been difficult to say with certainty if it was an herbivore or carnivore, which
in my opinion, leaves too much to the imagination.
It died down during the Permian period, the time when oxygen levels in the atmosphere dropped and
the lush Carboniferous forests were replaced with arid, desert-like environments. Good for us humans
though, I personally wouldn’t know what to do if I see one of these crawling out from under a rock.
Number 7. Smilodon
Smilodon is an extinct saber-toothed cat which lived approximately 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago –
from the Early Pleistocene Period through the Modern Period. It was first discovered during the early
19th century and was named by Peter Wilhelm Lund in 1842. This cat’s name means “saber-tooth.”
One of the most fascinating facts about Smilodon is that while it is often referred to as a saber-toothed
tiger, it really wasn’t a tiger. Smilodon is actually distantly related to modern lions and cheetahs. They
were approximately 5 feet long, 3 feet high and weighed around 440 pounds. That makes them smaller
than a modern lion in length but is also means they were a little bit heavier.
What seems really scary about these cats, however, were the size of their teeth. Their canine teeth were
almost a foot long. However, its teeth were also very brittle and would often break off while they were
using them. And once one of their teeth had broken, then it would never come back. That’s not to say
they weren’t dangerous because that isn’t true at all. These big cats still managed to take down their
prey without a whole lot of problems.
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