Meet the most fearsome prehistoric creatures to roam the Earth and discover the food chains they depended on

WORDS SCOTT DUTFIELD

© Getty

The ability to kill and ingest another living organism has been a keystone for the evolution of life as we know it. Without it, the world would be very different. Primitive organisms may have never emerged from the primordial soup at the beginning of life on Earth some 3.7 billion years ago. During life’s complicated journey to the modern day, some organisms rose to the top of the food chain, feasting on the flesh of those below them. This predator-prey relationship is part of the natural machine that keeps every ecosystem on Earth functioning.

Predators got their start in the world’s waters during the Paleozoic era, which started with the Cambrian period around 541 million years ago. Animals were confined to the oceans and had not yet sprouted legs to venture on land. One of the earliest predators were conodonts. These eel-like creatures were a few centimetres long with rows of rudimentary teeth scientists call elements. These were up to three millimetres in length and made of calcium carbonate. Conodonts were likely filter feeders and used their elements to prey upon tiny plankton for food.

Sharks have been hunting longer than trees have existed

Some unusual-looking early ocean predators were radiodonts. Some of these shrimp-like creatures used large curved appendages to tear through the tough exoskeletons of trilobite prey. The flesh of their benthic bounty was then manoeuvred by the appendages into a mouth opening directly beneath the head. During the geological periods that followed the Cambrian, diversity in Earth’s oceans exploded. The Devonian period – 419 million to 358.9 million years ago – is often referred to as the ‘Age of Fishes’ and gave rise to some of the most menacing marine predators to have ever lived.