I think all dinosaurs are equally awesome, and while you are certainly allowed to have your favorites, to claim one dinosaur is better than another dinosaur is absurd in my book. They are all chill.
There’s Dolichorhynchops, who lived in the ocean, and Stegosaurus, who was like a football player, and Pterodactyl, who lived in the sky. Also the ones with the long necks. Those dudes are so cool.
Now, ready to join the gang of super cool dinosaurs above is Carnufex carolinensis. That’s a recently discovered dinosaur that looked like a crocodile but lived on land and ran on its back two legs.
It’s also a dad of all the crocodiles around today. How many modern murder species have you sired? From Motherboard:
Unlike its modern relatives, Carnufex walked upright on two legs, likely feeding on armored reptiles and early mammal-like animals. Measuring nine feet from head to tail, it roamed the planet 231 million years ago in what is now North Carolina. Only one fragmentary set of fossils from this species has been recovered, described in a study published this morning in Scientific Reports.
It ate ARMORED reptiles. That’s like swallowing a tank. Bet it ate a lot of barbecue, too. You know, being in North Carolina and all.
Just kidding. It didn’t have time for that. It was too busy being hard. Carnufex lived in tough times.
Indeed, though the subperiod that Carnufex lived in, called the Carnian stage, is named for the Carnic Alps, it may as well be a reference to how ecologically overwhelmed this era was with carnivores competing for apex status.
But in that dinosaur-eat-dinosaur world, Carnufex was so street that it got itself a nickname. The Carolina Butcher. That’s how damn deadly it was. You had to be ruthless back in that day. The early Triassic was basically like Gangs of New York or Los Angeles in the early 90s, except instead of guns they had teeth and instead of people they were dinosaurs.
[It] seems to be that the world Carnufex inhabited was an unrelenting bloodbath between upstart dinosaur species and incumbent mainstays like crocodylomorphs. It must have been a violent era to live through, but the rich medley of meat-eaters that it produced paints a fascinating portrait of a hunter-heavy ecosystem.
Man, imagine just walking down the street and getting eaten by a dinosaur. I guess it wouldn’t be that unexpected, because you are a dinosaur, too.
But no one ate the Carolina Butcher. Look how boss it was.
GAAAWWRARWW