The Sahara Desert was once flooded with history’s most vicious dinosaurs
Huge predatory dinosaurs—like the abelisaur, a short-snouted predatory dinosaur and the pterosaur, both pictured here—once roamed regions of what is now the Sahara Desert. (Artwork by Davide Bonadonna, under the scientific supervision of Simone Maganuco and Nizar Ibrahim/)During these times of quarantine, last month feels like 100 million years ago. But if you were to actually go back to that period of time and make your way to the western Sahara, you’d likely run into a whole new set of problems in the form of hordes of enormous predators, according to a new study. Instead of a desert, the region was covered by a vast river system that flowed up through present-day Morocco and Algeria. Strangely, paleontologists have found very few fossils of the plant-eating dinosaurs that roamed much of the world at the time. Rather, many of the fossils they have identified belonged to flesh-eating dinosaurs, flying reptiles called...