There is a peculiar magic and an almost fairy-tale horror about a rarely sighted monster in a river not too clear. It emerges slowly, yet still too quickly, out of nowhere and cold-bloodedly devours prey that fills its entire mouth. In the Cretaceous period, this description could apply to the over five-meter-long coelacanth Mawsonia. A fisherman’s dream or nightmare, at that time perhaps that of spinosaurs.

In the Triassic, amphibians were the bane of the waters: mastodonsaurs between three and five meters long spent almost their entire lives in the water. Thick tusks could also catch prey that ventured onto the shore to drink – in the later Triassic a severe threat to early dinosaurs.