A 9-Foot Skull That Bit an Ichthyosaur Clean in Half

For five hundred million years Earth has been running one experiment: which weapon wins? The answer keeps changing. In the Cambrian seas it was Anomalocaris, the first hunter with real eyes. In the Ordovician it was Cameroceras, a twenty-foot cone of stone drifting through the dark like a missile. Then the arms race escalated. Dunkleosteus turned its skull into a pair of bone shears. Otodus megalodon abandoned armour for sheer scale and closed its seven-foot jaws with up to forty thousand pounds of force. In the Carboniferous, oxygen reached thirty-five percent and the arthropods grew into it: Arthropleura at eight and a half feet, and Meganeura, a dragonfly the size of an eagle, hunting a sky with nothing else in it. On land came Tyrannosaurus rex, Spinosaurus and the sickle-clawed Utahraptor. Offshore, in the seas nicknamed Hell's Aquarium, Mosasaurus swallowed prey whole while Pliosaurus funkei drove a nine-foot skull through an ichthyosaur and split it in half. After the asteroid, Smilodon populator and the short-faced bear Arctodus simus took the empty throne. But the deadliest animal on this planet never needed size at all. It weighs two and a half milligrams, has no teeth and no claws, and it kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. So what really makes a creature deadly - force, or reach? Settle in for the full story, and subscribe for more feature-length documentaries on Earth's deep past. #DeadliestCreatures #PrehistoricEarth #Documentary the deadliest creatures ever discovered, deadliest creatures ever, deadliest animals of all time, apex predators, prehistoric predators, deadliest animals, full documentary, prehistoric documentary, prehistoric animals,