And I’m interested in your rationale. Pick any period in history, land, sea, or air. Mix and match, or provide different versions for different eras or themes.
I’ll provide mine at some point, but I’ll kick it off by saying any all-time Mount Rushmore MUST include Tyrannosaurus Rex. Why? Come on…from Wiki:
Also, T. Rex is hella-cool.
So, what say you?
Cave Bear, and Saber toothed Tiger would have been a problem.
I saw a BBC nature documentary filmed in India, and this one tiger was eating bears. Not completely without injury after every encounter, mind you, but it was pretty clear who was the apex predator.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens
There’s in truth no competition.
Since you already mentioned T-Rex…
Megalodon
(sadly) Feral cats
Polar Bear
Honey Badger
They will even fuck each other over for a goddamned percentage!
But they mostly come out at night. Mostly.
Humans have no sharp teeth or fangs, no claws, no poison spray. Not even fur or pointy spines.
What’s the problem?
Humans have knives, swords, spears, guns, chemical, bacteriological and nuclear weapons, and even worse: writing, culture and technology.
Crocodiles, especially salties.
Best summed up in this youtube bit.
But humans are no match one on one with wolves or bears and other critters.
Whoa! Yeah, they’re nasty.
That’s why we don’t fight one on one with them, we use the traditional weapons of our people: Slowly poison their environment until their hair falls off and they become sterile.
But that could take days!
In the Journals of Lewis and Clark, Meriwether Lewis sets down some of the more interesting prose about Grizzly bears. Unknown to Science, they were regaled with tales about the “white bears” by the various nations going up the Missouri river and the expedition members were anxious to see them. Lewis was intrigued by the descriptions, and noted that the tribes geared up and prepared practically as if they were going to war.
But Lewis thought all this was hype and exaggeration. Besides, he reasoned, no bear could be a threat to an organized modern infantry rifle company. But then they started seeing the tracks in the river banks. Uh-oh. And then they started getting attacked, in those days grizzlies would basically attack on sight of a human. Even with well aimed rifle fire, the grizzlies were very tough to kill and they had enough of them very quickly.
“The curiosity of our party with respect to these gentlemen is pretty well satisfied” he wrote, just a little humor there I can detect. LOL
Great White Sharks have been around perhaps the longest
'Zactly.
And long before we had those things we had teamwork. And we slaughtered our way through many many species of large dangerous herbivores, and no few species of predators with nothing more than that.
Then came thrown rocks and spears. The rest, as they say, is history. We are the apex predator and have been since then. We haven’t killed or domesticated everything yet, but we kinda lost interest 5000 years ago when all that was left was mostly too small or mostly too rare to care about. Mostly.
I want to include Terror Birds, because even though they aren’t the most impressive predator in history, an ecosystem where the apex predator is a bird is awesome.
Great White Shark
African Lion
Internecivus raptus XX121
Randy Orton
Aside from humans, there are few carnivores more widespread than the gray wolf. At the height of their distribution, lions came close. That’s pretty damn impressive, for both species.
Tyrannosaurs have a very healthy temporal distribution, and closely related animals made it to (or came from, depending on how you reconstruct the family tree) Asia.
Coelophysis has an even better temporal distribution and is in some ways a dinosaur trailblazer of sorts.