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Scientists ran a simulation: drop a human into prehistoric Russia. 27 collapsed. 5 never woke up. Here's what was waiting.
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00:01Scientists say something strange, drop a human being into Russia 252 million years ago, and you will not survive 3
00:06minutes.
00:07There is a secret simulation experiment where volunteers were put inside a VR recreation of the late Permian.
00:1227 of them broke down on the spot.
00:145 had to be hospitalized.
00:16Why?
00:17Because that world had a creature we call Innostransivia, with saber-like fangs and a running speed that beat the
00:21fastest predators of its age.
00:23Its specialty was biting straight through skulls.
00:25And the terrifying part is that this land did not hold one kind of apex killer.
00:28It held a whole category of them.
00:31On land there were reptiles crueler than any tiger alive today.
00:34In the water swam armored monsters 3 meters long.
00:36In the sky flew insects with wingspans over 2 meters.
00:39But none of that is the real horror.
00:41The real horror is a time bomb ticking underground in Siberia, and when it finally went off, it killed 98
00:46% of all life on Earth.
00:47This is not science fiction.
00:49This actually happened.
00:51It remains the deadliest extinction event in the history of our planet.
00:54You might think, Russia, that is just a cold place, right?
00:57Just put on a space suit and you will be fine.
00:59You could not be more wrong.
01:01Russia back then was not the frozen country we know.
01:03It was a scorching prison built by geology itself.
01:06Let us turn the clock back 252 million years, to the end of the Permian.
01:10At that time all the continents were joined into one landmass called Pengia.
01:13And the region we now call Siberia was the most isolated, the most alien place on that supercontinent.
01:18If you could travel there, your very first sensation would not be cold.
01:22It would be heat.
01:23The interior was a landscape of burning desert, and the temperature was hot enough to bake a human into jerky.
01:27And the hopeless part is that you could not escape even if you tried.
01:30To one side rose the central Pangaean mountains, taller than the Himalayas, blocking every breath of air from reaching you.
01:36To the west lay a shallow sea cutting you off from Europe.
01:38To the east were the Euro mountains, just beginning to rise.
01:41This place was a naturally sealed arena with no exit.
01:44In that extreme environment, hot, arid, sealed off, life was forced into a frantic arms race.
01:49Ordinary animals died out long before.
01:51Everything that survived had evolved into a monster built for killing.
01:54That is why Permian Russia became the most terrifying monster factory in the history of the earth.
01:58And at the very top of that food chain stood a creature that still gives people nightmares.
02:02Some call it the Permian Tiger.
02:04Some call it the Crawling Nightmare.
02:06But biologists gave it a far more imposing name, the Gorgonopsian.
02:10You may believe dinosaurs were the greatest rulers earth has ever known.
02:13Next to a Gorgonopsian, the earliest dinosaur ancestors were little brothers at best.
02:17For most of their history they were simply prey.
02:19The Gorgonopsians, and above all the Russian species known as the Wolf of the Permian, were the absolute nightmare of
02:24their age.
02:25Picture a polar bear stripped of all its fur and dressed in thick rough hide.
02:28Then enlarged the skull by 40% and bolt on a pair of saber-like fangs.
02:32That is the Wolf of the Permian.
02:34Three and a half meters long, close to a ton in weight, and the first killer in earth's history to
02:38grow saber teeth, a full hundred million years before the later saber-toothed cats.
02:41When people see its fossil reconstruction, they often assume it crawled like a lizard and moved slowly.
02:46That is a serious underestimation.
02:48The fossil evidence shows that although it still looked reptilian, its four limbs had already begun to swing beneath its
02:52body, and it ran like a modern lion at full sprint.
02:55Its sense of smell was extremely sharp.
02:57Once it caught your scent, running to the ends of the earth would not help you.
03:00What makes it truly different is the way it killed.
03:03Ordinary predators, modern lions and tigers included, kill to eat, and they do it with a quick, clean bite to
03:08the throat.
03:08The Wolf of the Permian operated differently.
03:11Its skull was enormous, and its jaw could open to an astonishing 90 degrees.
03:15Those 15-centimeter saber teeth were not designed for a precise killing bite.
03:18They worked like two blades, made for slashing.
03:21Its jaw strength was less than that of A.T. Rex, but combined with the massive muscles of its neck,
03:25its method was simple, seize, tear, retreat.
03:28One bite could rip half of your body away or punch straight through your organs.
03:31Then it simply stood nearby, watching coldly as you bled out and slowly died.
03:35There is something almost financial about it, like a market slowly draining.
03:38It is death wrapped in despair, with a long delay before the end.
03:42On that Siberian wasteland no animal could withstand a single strike from the Wolf of the Permian.
03:46Even the best armored creature of the age, the huge, tank-like, plant-eating pariahsaur weighing close to a ton,
03:51was nothing more than a slightly tougher tin can to be opened.
03:53But you might think that if you avoid the Wolf of the Permian, you would be safe.
03:57That is far too naive.
03:58In this mad Russian world, it was not only the physical brutes who wanted to kill you.
04:02There were also magic attacks.
04:04There lived a group called the Therosephalians, creatures that looked even more mammalian than the Gorgonopsians, closer to our own
04:09distant ancestors.
04:10One of them had a name that meant a beast with a venomous bite.
04:13It resembled a bloated Siberian boar and weighed over 600 pounds.
04:17Scientists found a detail in its skull fossils that makes the blood run cold.
04:20Inside its upper jaw lay three carved grooves running straight into the root of the fangs.
04:24In modern animals that structure has only one function, delivering venom.
04:28That is right.
04:29This may be the largest venomous animal in the history of the Earth.
04:32If the wolf of the Permian bites you, you can still struggle for a while.
04:35If that venomous beast bites you, you may not even have time to cry out before your nerves go numb
04:39and you drop.
04:40A monster the size of a tiger, fast as a horse, and armed with venom.
04:43Ask yourself honestly whether you would be afraid.
04:46But say you decide the land is too dangerous, so you will simply jump into a lake or a river.
04:50Do not do it.
04:51That may be the most idiotic decision of your entire life.
04:54Permian Russia's waterways belong to giant amphibians.
04:57You might think modern crocodiles are fierce, but that is only because you have never met a prehistoric one.
05:01They looked like crocodiles, yet they were close relatives of frogs and salamanders.
05:05Some reached three meters long, like a stretched out crocodile packed with needle-sharp teeth.
05:09The most absurd of all was a kind of amphibian monster, nearly three meters long.
05:13It was not the strongest predator in the water, but it was by far the most treacherous.
05:17It would lie in wait at the water's edge exactly like a crocodile, with only its eyes above the surface.
05:22Whether you were a thirsty dinosaur ancestor or a Gorgonopsian who came down to drink, the moment you got close
05:26to the water you would be dragged under in a death roll.
05:28And these prehistoric amphibians were covered in bony armor plates, as if wearing a suit of armor, so ordinary attacks
05:33could not even break their skin.
05:35That created a perfect death loop.
05:36On land, the reason, and the venomous assassin.
05:39In the water, armor beasts.
05:41This is why scientists say that prehistoric Russia represents the limit of what life can endure.
05:45But what turned all of this into a tragedy was not the monsters.
05:48It was the ground itself.
05:50At the very edge of this mad age, deep beneath Permian Siberia, that time bomb finally reached zero.
05:55This is the famous Siberian traps event.
05:57Many people assume it was simply a volcanic eruption.
06:00No.
06:01That is far too small a way to describe it.
06:03This was not one volcano erupting.
06:05This was the earth tearing open around thousands of kilometers long.
06:08Magma from deep inside the mantle poured out like a flood.
06:11The eruption continued for hundreds of thousands of years.
06:14The volume of lava was enough to bury the entire United States under hundreds of meters of basalt.
06:18In some places in Siberia, layer upon layer of flood basalt is more than three kilometers thick.
06:23Imagine standing there.
06:25Everything your eye can reach is flowing fire.
06:27Black smoke blots out the sun, and daytime turns to night.
06:30But even that was not the deadliest part.
06:32The lava ignited enormous coal deposits underground, releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane.
06:37Global temperatures rose by more than 10 degrees in an extraordinarily short time.
06:41The ocean water became a hot soup at 40 degrees.
06:44Every coral reef died instantly.
06:46The seas turned into stagnant, choking poison.
06:48Acid rain and sulfur fell from the sky.
06:51Forests burned.
06:52Russia, so full of life just a moment before, had become hell.
06:55The wolf of the Permian, that unmatched killer.
06:58The treacherous venomous beasts.
07:00The armored monsters under the water.
07:02In front of this catastrophe, they had no chance to run.
07:05All their fangs and claws meant nothing against the suffocating air and the acid rain.
07:09It was a total purge.
07:1098% of all life on Earth vanished in this mass extinction.
07:14Evolution's ledger was almost erased down to the last entry.
07:16Only a tiny handful of survivors crawled out of the ashes.
07:19If you walk into a museum in Russia today and see the huge skull of a Gorgonopsian, you can still
07:23feel the killing power coming off it.
07:25They were the most perfect killing machines this planet has ever produced.
07:28They ruled the land for tens of millions of years.
07:31And in the end they still lost to nature.
07:33Paleontologists often say that Permian Russia was a cruel experiment.
07:36Nature was testing the limits of life here.
07:38The largest amphibians.
07:40The earliest saber-toothed predators.
07:42The strongest resistance to heat.
07:44They failed, but their legacy did not simply end.
07:47In the small corners that survived, in the intervals between catastrophes, hid little creatures the size of rats.
07:52They lived cautiously while the dinosaurs ruled the world.
07:55They waited in the dark for 160 million years.
07:57Then another asteroid struck the earth and took the dinosaurs away, and only then did they walk out again.
08:02Yes.
08:03Those unassuming little creatures were our own ancestors.
08:06So when we stare at the terrifying history of prehistoric Russia, we are not only looking at monsters.
08:10We are looking at where we ourselves came from.
08:13Because if that Siberian eruption had been just slightly more intense, the person sitting in front of the screen watching
08:17this video today would not be us.
08:19This is prehistoric Russia.
08:20A place crueler than hell, and yet a place where hope survived.
08:25We are looking at where we are.
08:25We are looking at where we are.
08:25We are looking at where we are looking at where we are.