Scariest dinosaurs

01

Majungasaurus

Majungasaurus ate its own kind — we know because its teeth left marks on its own species' bones. A cannibal confirmed not by behavior but by the wound it signed.

02

Sue (dinosaur)

Sue's skeleton logged gout, healed T. rex bite wounds, and a jawbone rotted through by bacterial infection — a biography of agony written in 67-million-year-old bone.

03

Scipionyx

One baby Scipionyx, dead 113 million years ago, still holds its liver, intestines, and windpipe in anatomical position. It is the only dinosaur fossil with soft organs visible to the naked eye.

04

Irritator

Paleontologists named it 'Irritator' — formally, in the scientific literature — because a fossil smuggler had packed car body filler into the skull to counterfeit a complete specimen.

05

Protoceratops

Protoceratops skulls and clawed skeletons littered the Gobi Desert for millennia before Greece mapped the Silk Road. Herodotus's gold-guarding griffin may be the fossil, remembered wrong.

06

Therizinosaurus

Therizinosaurus carried three-foot claws — longer than any animal's, ever recorded — and used them to rake leaves. The most terrifying hand on the planet belonged to a herbivore.

07

Utahraptor

Utahraptor weighed as much as a grizzly bear and carried a 9-inch hooked claw on each foot — the weapon that made Jurassic Park's Velociraptors look like the timid cousins they actually were.

08

Diplodocus

Diplodocus's tail ended in a thin whip-tip that could break the sound barrier — a 45-foot bullwhip cracking a sonic boom, possibly the loudest sound made by any land animal.

09

Psittacosaurus

One Psittacosaurus specimen still wears its skin — and that skin shows countershaded stripes, making it the first dinosaur whose actual color pattern has been scientifically confirmed.

10

Nigersaurus

Nigersaurus ran 500 teeth in stacked conveyor-belt rows that cycled out every 14 days. Its skull was so thin and window-riddled it could not be removed from the ground in one piece.