A new study conducted by an international team of researchers has found the most dangerous place on earth. As per the new research, Sahara has been named the most dangerous region in the history of planet earth, where deadly beings like ferocious predators, flying reptiles, and crocodile-like hunters reigned in the ancient past.
A window to Africa's Age of Dinosaurs
Scientists who took part in the study made this assumption after analyzing several fossils from an area of Cretaceous rock formations in south-eastern Morocco, known as the Kem Kem Group. Researchers, in their study report published in the journal ZooKeys, suggested that this area was home to a vast river system in the ancient ages.
The research report revealed that several aquatic and terrestrial animals lived in this system, and it includes Carcharodontosaurus and Deltadromeus, two of the most dangerous dinosaur species that ever walked in the surface of the earth.
Professor David Martill from the University of Portsmouth who is the co-author of the study assumes that these predators mostly fed on fishes in the river system.
"This place was filled with absolutely enormous fish, including giant coelacanths and lungfish. The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times large than today's coelacanth. There is an enormous freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth, they are like barbed daggers, but beautifully shiny," said Martill in a recent statement.
Biggest study in 100 years
This study is widely touted to be the biggest of its kind, conducted in collaboration by researchers from the Universities of Detroit, Chicago, Montana, Portsmouth (UK), Leicester (UK), Casablanca (Morocco), and McGill (Canada), along with the Paris Museum of Natural History.
"This is the most comprehensive piece of work on fossil vertebrates from the Sahara in almost a century since the famous German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach published his last major work in 1936," added Martill.