Paleontologists Identified The Most Dangerous Place In Earth’s History
Davide Bonadonna
This year, scientists identified the most dangerous place for a human in history.
If you’ve ever wondered how humans would fare against dinosaurs if the two lived together on Earth, this particular bit of science news will give you some pretty frightening food for thought.
A group of international paleontologists discovered what they claim would have been the most dangerous time and place in Earth’s history. Based on the team’s study, which was published in the journal ZooKeys, the most dangerous place in history would have been 100 million years ago in what is now the Sahara.
Researchers noted that their conclusion was based on the “most comprehensive piece of work on fossil vertebrates from the Sahara in almost a century.”
Paleontologists poured through decades’ worth of fossil records from museums around the world. They also studied notes on the Kem Kem Formation (otherwise known as the Kem Kem Beds) in Africa, which is a grouping of geological formations around what is now the border between Algeria and Morocco.
The Kem Kem Beds are a fossil-rich body of sediment dating back to the Cretaceous period that has been studied by researchers over the years. But 100 million years ago, the area was home to some of the most dangerous apex predators on the planet.
“This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time-traveler would not last very long,” said Nizar Ibrahim, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Detroit Mercy.
The authors found that the prehistoric beds contained an unusually high amount of large carnivore fossils, like the saber-toothed Carcharodontosaurus, which had teeth that measured eight-inches-long with a body that was 26 feet in size, and lived side-by-side the Deltadromeus, a ferocious member of the velociraptor family.
That’s not counting the giant reptiles that inhabited both the air and the grounds across the territory. The waterways were no safe haven, either.
“This place was filled with absolutely enormous fish, including giant coelacanths and lungfish,” said David Martill, a co-author of the study. “There is an enormous freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth — they are like barbed daggers, but beautifully shiny.”
It’s a terrifying thought to imagine a human trying to survive amid all these prehistoric beasts. Fortunately, we never had to find out how it would end in real life.
