Take a guess at the most dangerous place in history. Auschwitz in 1944? Hiroshima in 1945? Chernobyl in 1986? The salient quote includes the word "arguably," but it reveals the best guess so far about a dangerous place produced by nature and not mankind. And that would be what is now the Sahara Desert.
About 100 million years ago, the area was home to a vast river system, filled with many different species of aquatic and terrestrial animals. Fossils from the Kem Kem Group include three of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever known, including the sabre-toothed Carcharodontosaurus (over 8m in length with enormous jaws and long, serrated teeth up to eight inches long) and Deltadromeus (around 8m in length, a member of the raptor family with long, unusually slender hind limbs for its size), as well as several predatory flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and crocodile-like hunters. Dr Ibrahim said: "This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long."
The dinosaurs were big and hungry, but their prey was huge, too. Read about the fossils of the Kem Kem beds at Eureka Alert. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Davide Bonadonna)