00:00All your life, you have been afraid of the wrong things.
00:03Scientists once ran an experiment.
00:05They asked a thousand people to name the animal they feared most.
00:09Number one was not a lion.
00:11It was not a shark.
00:13It was the spider.
00:15A creature the size of a plate beat every monster on earth.
00:19What does that tell us?
00:20What human beings truly fear was never the big things.
00:24It was always the small ones.
00:27And prehistory proved it long ago.
00:29Let us start with Argentina.
00:31In its rivers lived a fish 130th the size of a tiger, yet it could bite clean through a cow's
00:36thigh bone.
00:37Its bite force reached 3,000 newtons, fiercer than a full-grown tiger.
00:43Australia had a kind of rat.
00:45It weighed no more than a pug.
00:47Some of them were only 5 to 10 kilos.
00:50But in its mouth sat a row of spear-shaped teeth, carved like blades.
00:54Along its jaw ran one enormous blade-shaped tooth, serrated along both edges, built for slicing meat and bone.
01:01No living mammal has a jaw like that.
01:04It did not bite to kill.
01:06It impaled prey and swallowed them whole.
01:10Paleontologists have found three separate species of them, which means this was no accident of evolution.
01:15It was an entire family of professional killers, feeding on birds, other small animals, even other mammals.
01:21A rat the size of a puppy, running through the rainforest with spears in its mouth.
01:26Can you picture that?
01:28And the ocean 500 million years ago was worse.
01:31Back then, almost nothing lived on land.
01:34The whole world belonged to the sea.
01:37And in that sea lived something so numerous it is hard to imagine.
01:41A carnivorous segmented worm.
01:43You may never have heard that name.
01:46But you know its modern descendant, the bobbit worm.
01:49The bobbit worm is a nightmare.
01:51It buries its entire body in the sand, leaving only its jaws above,
01:55and the instant something swims past it strikes in milliseconds,
01:59cutting its prey in two before dragging it down to digest.
02:02The whole thing is over before you can blink.
02:05In the Ordovician period, the ancestors of this worm were everywhere.
02:09Scientists have found thousands of their jaw fossils worldwide.
02:13Back then, these carnivorous worms were as common as herring.
02:17Put a toe in the water and you could hit one.
02:19And their size is the truly terrifying part.
02:22Most jaws were only 2 millimeters across.
02:25But the largest, judged from those fossils, may have grown 2 meters long.
02:30The fossil record is called scolecidont, and it is found on every continent.
02:35A 2 meter carnivorous worm, waiting in the sand under your feet.
02:39That alone would give any diver nightmares.
02:41In the same ocean lived something even stranger.
02:45Econidont.
02:46Think of it as a prehistoric piranha, but 10,000 times more terrifying.
02:51Why?
02:52Because it had the sharpest teeth of any animal ever known.
02:56Not one of the sharpest.
02:57The sharpest.
02:59Scientists measured them.
03:02Conidont teeth were 300 times sharper than human teeth, 25 times sharper than a scalpel blade.
03:08The tip was 120th the width of a hair.
03:11What does that mean?
03:12It could pierce your skin and you would barely feel it.
03:15The cut is simply too clean.
03:18Your nerves never get the chance to react.
03:20It fed the way piranhas do, driving those blade-like teeth into other marine animals and eating them from the
03:26inside out.
03:27And there is evidence some species carried venom.
03:30So picture it.
03:31A meter-long conidont, teeth sharper than a scalpel, possibly venomous, piercing your body and eating your flesh.
03:37This creature survived nearly 300 million years, from the Cambrian until the Jurassic.
03:43The entire Paleozoic Ocean was its dining room.
03:47Now we leave the sea.
03:49You think you are safe on land?
03:51Think again.
03:52Does a cockroach ever wander into your kitchen?
03:55Do you flinch when you see one?
03:57Let me tell you something.
04:00A hundred million years ago, in the Cretaceous, there was a cockroach that did not eat garbage.
04:05It ate meat.
04:06It was named manipulator Modificaputis.
04:09It was found in 2015 in a piece of Burmese amber, a hundred million years old.
04:14It measured four and a half millimeters, barely bigger than your little fingernail.
04:18But its anatomy made every entomologist gasp.
04:22It had a head that could rotate a full 360 degrees.
04:26It had an unusually long neck.
04:29Its forelegs were covered in spines that could grab prey the way a mantis does.
04:33Its overall shape looked like a cockroach and a mantis had a child,
04:37and that child inherited the most terrifying genes of both.
04:40The scientists who first described it assumed it was an active hunter,
04:43sprinting across the Cretaceous forest floor,
04:46striking down other insects with those spined legs.
04:49A newer study in 2020 argued it may have fed on flowers instead,
04:53living quietly in the Cretaceous forests.
04:55The debate continues to this day, and nobody has settled it.
04:59But the mere idea of a carnivorous cockroach is enough to keep you awake at night.
05:04And if a meat-eating cockroach sounds absurd, you have not heard about flying ants.
05:09Around 49 million years ago, in what is now Germany, America and Canada,
05:14scientists found a fossil ant.
05:17Titanomyrma.
05:18The largest ant ever to live on Earth.
05:20How large?
05:22Its body was the size of a hummingbird.
05:25Its wingspan exceeded 15 centimeters.
05:28Yes, you heard that right.
05:30Not only was it huge.
05:32It could fly.
05:34Imagine a swarm of bird-sized ants beating their wings and flying straight at you.
05:38What unsettles people even more is what it ate.
05:42Scientists first assumed it was herbivorous, living on plants.
05:46Later research showed it is closely related to modern army ants.
05:50And army ants need no introduction.
05:53They march in columns of 20 million, sweeping the ground bare, stripping every living thing
05:57to bone, sparing nothing, not even the injured.
06:01Titanomyrma was several times the size of an army ant.
06:04If it swarmed the way army ants do, anything in its path, no matter how large, would be stripped
06:10to a skeleton.
06:11Now look down at that tiny ant on your kitchen counter.
06:15Somehow it looks almost cute.
06:16Finally, let us talk about something truly extreme.
06:20The giant piranha.
06:22You know the piranha.
06:24That little fish that gathers in Amazon rivers and packs and can strip a cow to bone in minutes.
06:30Modern piranhas are frightening enough.
06:32Their ancestor was worse.
06:34Far worse.
06:368 to 10 million years ago in Argentina swam Megapiranya piranensis.
06:40It was about 71 centimeters long and weighed around 10 kilograms.
06:45That does not sound like much, does it?
06:48But its bite, according to a 2012 paper in Scientific Reports, was conservatively estimated
06:53between 1,000 and 4,700 newtons.
06:57What does that mean?
06:59Measured against body weight, its bite force exceeded Tyrannosaurus rex.
07:03It exceeded the megalodon.
07:05It exceeded every known predatory animal that ever lived.
07:09A fish weighing 20 gene had a proportionally stronger bite than a 6-ton T-Rex.
07:13That is not a guess.
07:16Scientists built a replica of its jaw and ran crushing tests on real specimens.
07:21It could bite through a cow's femur, through a sea turtle's shell, through the armored scales
07:26of an arapaima.
07:27And unlike modern piranhas, Megapiranya was probably a solitary hunter.
07:32It needed no pack.
07:34One was enough.
07:35A single bite shattered bone.
07:38Why would it need help?
07:39There was no need to hunt in numbers, because a single strike ended everything.
07:44Scientists say, relative to its body size, Megapiranya had the strongest bite of any vertebrate
07:50ever measured.
07:51Not one of the strongest.
07:53The strongest.
07:54It holds the record by a wide margin.
07:57So look again at the way we think.
07:59We are always frightened by the enormous things.
08:02An ancient monster.
08:05A T-Rex.
08:06A megalodon.
08:08But what truly makes the hair on your neck stand up is the little things.
08:12A rat the size of a pug that could impale you with its teeth.
08:15A 2-meter worm waiting under the sand to pull you down.
08:19A fish with teeth sharper than a surgical blade that could crawl inside your body.
08:24A cockroach that could chase you down and grab you.
08:27An ant with wings that could strip you to bone.
08:29A fish weighing 20 gene whose bite crushed a T-Rex by proportion.
08:34Being big does not make something terrifying.
08:37Being small does not make you safe.
08:39On the stage of evolution, small was never a disadvantage.
08:44Small ones were the real nightmares.
08:46And the most chilling part of all is this.
08:49These nightmares actually existed.
08:51Not in a film.
08:53Not in a game.
08:55Right here.
08:56On the same planet you are standing on.
08:59In the same soil beneath your feet.
09:01And in evolutionary time, it was only a moment ago.
09:05The next time something small crawls across your floor, remember what it came from.
