Prehistoric Ancestors Can you imagine what the world would be like if prehistoric animals came back to life Well you are about to fi nd out What’s so bizarre is that some of these animals will look familiar to you they are the ancestors of modern mammals reptiles and insects And they have crash-landed in a location near you So watch out it’s as if they had not gone extinct after all All life started in the sea and there were some pretty weird creatures 505 million years ago Hallucigenia right had long thin legs and spines on its back In time some creatures moved out of the water to live on land The oldest known land animal is a millipede from 428 million years ago In time these crawlers grew to 7 feet 6 inches 2 3 meters long Good thing they didn’t fl y they might have collided with dragonfl ies the size of modern birds of prey Eoraptor H allucigenia When they evolved 240 230 million years ago dinosaurs were about the size of turkeys One of the fi rst was Eoraptor left It was only 3 feet 3 inches 1 m long much of which was tail and weighed about the same as a dachshund With abundant food and oxygen though dinosaurs grew and grew and came to dominate the planet for about 160 million years 6
While dinosaurs ruled most mammals were the size of shrews simply to avoid being eaten by those hungry carnivores But after the dinosaurs died out many mammals became massive and so did reptiles Did you know that a rodent the size of a buffalo and a snake longer than a bus once roamed the Earth What if you saw them rampaging around your world They re not likely to be as nicely behaved as a pet guinea pig or lizard Sometimes it worked the other way Imagine an African elephant towering over its tiny ancestor the island-dwelling dwarf elephant left This little guy would even have looked small next to the well-named elephant bird standing 10 feet 3 m tall below What would it be like to bring these and other animal ancestors back to life in all their weird and wonderful glory and scariness If you’ve got the courage read on Dwarf elephant and be prepared for some truly bizarre and spine-tingling encounters between modern creatures and prehistoric beasts Elephant bird 7
Monster Snake TitanoboA Something’s hisssssing And it’s sssslipped through the water and ssssslithered into a pool where hippos are hanging out Yes it’s a snake all right but not just any snake It’s 48 feet 14 6 m of pure muscle longer than fi ve ping-pong tables put end to end You wouldn’t think a massive hippo would be troubled by a snake no matter how big But this is Titanoboa It’s going for the hippo’s neck and it’s ready to puncture the hide with its long sharp teeth And if you think that even Titanoboa would not be able to get its mouth around a hippo’s neck remember that a snake’s lower jaws can unhinge into two halves Titanoboa’s teeth were probably curved so that prey couldn’t pull away With its grip steady it could then coil its immensely powerful body around the hippo This would shut off the blood supply to the hippo’s vital organs such as its heart and brain So Titanoboa would literally be squeezing the life out of this poor old hippo walking jaws Titanoboa’s jaws not only came apart but could also move forward separately So it would have walked its jaws along the body of the hippo to swallow it Its curved teeth could grip on one side while the other half of the jaw moved forward until the whole hippo vanished dissolved by acid Once the hippo had been swallowed by Titanoboa it would be dissolved by acids in the snake’s stomach The actual kill might take a matter of minutes but the digestion would take days Titanoboa PRONOUNCED Tie-tan-oh-BO-ah LIVED South America 60 million 58 million years ago LENGTH Up to 48 feet 14 6 m WEIGHT About 1 25 tons 1 13 metric tons 8
