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"Bite Worse Than the Bark" Maip Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, Chorrillo Formation The sun rises on a new day, bathing the clubmosses and podocarps in light. It's springtime, and the days are getting longer again. The frogs are croaking, the mammals are emerging, the turtles are basking, and the birds have new young. Sometime in the next five hundred thousand years, disaster will strike. But today is not that day. Maip macrothorax is the apex predator of southern South America. Ten meters long, it takes on the name of a malicious Aonikenk figure. The biggest of all megaraptorans, Maip would have had dexterous forelimbs (for a theropod dinosaur, at least) as well as huge knife-like claws on its hands, allowing it to grapple prey and create big, gashing wounds while doing so. There are two juvenile Maip in this picture, and they have fucked up big time by blundering into the territory of an unrelated adult. Like in many apex predators today, such an interaction would likely be hostile. Being relatively small in their younger state, I've also interpreted these guys as being capable of scaling trees when small, like black bears. Also, the juveniles have blue eyes here while the adult's are oranger! As a southern region, the Chorrillo formation would have been temperate and humid. The plants show similar cloud forest ecosystems, but the area doesn't seem to have been high-altitude. Alongside the Maip are a cast of other, smaller characters. Meiolaniid turtles existed back then (and went extinct sooooo close to the modern day, RIP), and of course there are enantiornithines like Yatenavis (one of the ones here has a little beggy fledgeling), as well as frogs and mammals of the time (such as Magallanodon under the rocks, one of the larger kinds of Gondwana). Another goal of mine was to draw a Mesozoic piece with no ferns in it! The ground is dominated by magnoliids and other primitive angiosperms as shrubs and small trees, podocarps and herbaceous conifers, as well as a majority clubmoss cover. Next up will be the first Paleogene piece! Stay tuned!