As bad as you might think things are on planet Earth, be glad you live now. This is actually a rather cool and calm period for weather, and we have fewer dangerous creatures than ever.

To prove it, lets turn the clock back and look at the top 5 most dangerous creatures in Wyoming history.

Things started calm enough. Sea creatures inhabited Wyoming during the Precambrian when this land was covered by a shallow sea. The deep waters were mostly inhabited by a harmless stromatolite-forming bacteria. This sea remained in place during the early Paleozoic era and would come to be inhabited by creatures like brachiopods, ostracizes, and trilobites. Mostly harmless.

So now lets move the clock ahead and get into the dangerous stuff.

1) As the sea was cut off, Wyoming became something of a swamp. Rather like the Everglades in Florida, but much bigger. Now, the state had crocodiles. 

2) Deinonychus roamed the land. This creature was the model for the "Velociraptors" in Jurassic Park. But what you saw in the movie was fiction. They were actually a voracious, feathered, human-sized raptor that preyed on the plant-munching dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous period.

3). T-REX must be mentioned as one of the most dangerous during this period.

4) Saber Toothed Tiger - These massive cats roamed Wyoming during the Eocene, about 49 to 37 million years ago. One of these big guys, the largest meat-eating mammal found, is from the Wind River Formation of Wyoming known as Malfelis badwaterensis.

5) Grizzly Bears take us leaping into the present, since they are still among us. But I mention them because the history of these animals goes a long way back. They have always been powerful hunters, even in their earlier forms.

I guess today the most dangerous creatures in Wyoming are the humans. Most of them are harmless, but a few of them -- wow.

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