Prehistory had no shortage of terrifying monsters, with everything from the more well-known Raptors and Rexes to super rats and three-eyed shrimp . As pants-ruining as all those things might be, however, science is always unearthing new veins of rich, ancient terror-beasts that would make H.P. Lovecraft terror-puke right in Stephen King's eye.

8 A Carnivorous Bird Monster With a 40-Foot Wingspan

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The concept of a flying, carnivorous lizard is plenty terrifying on its own. Even in movies, pterodactyls and such are pretty small, because you simply don't need to up the fear quotient by depicting the things as 40 feet across or like 400 pounds. But that didn't stop nature from being the unholy little achiever that it is and doing just that.

Wikipedia

And then putting funny little berets on their heads.

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The Azhdarchidae family were a group of gigantic pterosaurs that plied the skies of the late Cretaceous. Members of the group included Quetzalcoatlus (named after the Aztec sun god Quetzalcoatl, a giant feathered serpent), Azhdarcho (named after a type of Uzbek dragon) and Titanopteryx (whose name means "really big opteryx"). Now, let's not get carried away and start picturing leathery-winged reptilian bird-things hunting you down from the skies and carrying you off to feed their younglings. Evidence shows that they were simply too large to have effectively grabbed prey and flown off with it.

Oh, is that not comforting? That the bird monster's only problem was being too fucking gargantuan to fly away with your corpse after it killed you? Sorry. Does this scale diagram help?