by Samantha Gilmartin

A list of the five most terrifying creatures to have ever walked/crawled/swam the earth.
In the pleasantly safe and sterile modern world it is easy to assume that monsters only exist in the movies. We think that terrifying beasties are just the products of overactive Hollywood imaginations.

Giant sharks, enormous predatory insects, these are the things nightmares are made of. They appear in our nightmares for good reason, once upon a time they stalked, scuttled, swam and buzzed around the planet.

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Fossil records show that millions of years ago earth was home to some real monsters far worse that those you see in the movies. Here’s a run down of five of the most terrifying creatures that have ever called our planet home. By the end of this list you’ll be glad that the spider in your bathtub didn’t bring his long-lost cousin with him.

1) Andrewsarchus

An unusual creature, Andrewsarchus was a powerfully-built wolf-like mammal that lived roughly 40 million years ago during the Eocene period. It walked on all fours and had hooves like a modern sheep or cow, making it the embodiment of “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Almost everything we know about this ancient creature comes from a single three foot long skull found in Mongolia. The creature had powerful jaws, perhaps the strongest ever evolved in a land mammal and strong teeth which have led palaeontologists to suggest that Andrewsarchus was capable of biting straight through bone. Presuming Andrewsarchus was proportioned similarly to other members of the same group, it would have stood over six feet tall at the shoulder and was over 12 feet long not including the tail.
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by Juliana Rincón Parra

The mythology in Latin America is quite rich: some tales have been passed onto us from the Incas, Mayas or Aztecs, and others are colonial imports from Europe. On this first part of the multinational Latin American post, we’ll visit some of the most popular myths and legends like the Llorona, the Cegua, the Cadejos and the Evil Light.

Legends and myths are part of our culture. Nina Maguid mentions in her post “Of Fear and Frights”, that these stories were told in first person and usually around some source of fire, and I couldn’t agree more. I used to hear local versions of some of these stories during my holidays, sitting around dining room tables at rural farmhouses, our faces lit up by a flickering kerosene lamp. All it took for a story to be recalled was the unexplained baying of dogs or a horse galloping by in the dead of the night. Nina mentions three specific frights famous in her mother’s Argentinean hometown: The bad light, the widow and the pig.

According to Comodín at El Blog de Oro, this light would be used to hunt for treasure: if it was a white light, it would signal gold and silver treasure, if it was red, they had to run away, since it was the devil at work. This myths is by no means unique to Argentina: all over the world people have tried to explain the meaning of these mysterious lights which appear at twilight, like in Spain and Chile.

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The Widow was a woman slighted in love, who died when she discovered her husband was unfaithful. She signed a deal with the devil to remain forever in this world and get her revenge. She would jump on single men’s horses and ride pillion with them, and if they got frightened, she would kill them. The only way to remain unscathed was by carrying a rosary or crucifix and not getting scared. This myth is so fixed in Argentinean folklore that the expression “getting visited by the Widow” is a synonym for an unexpected or disagreeable event.

El Loco Bender (Crazy Bender) also writes about the Black Widow, and adds a bit more flair to the hair-raising story by promising a lonely, slow and painful death to those fickle or unfaithful men she meets.
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I was browsing around Youtube and came across this video. It is quite interesting as it has well-known photos of unexplained creatures. Some of these photos have been proven to be fake, others on the other hand seem to be real and a couple are factual. Take a look and decide which are which for yourself:

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