You are in the badlands of North America, 220 million years ago.

The air in the Late Triassic Arizona basin was thick, hot, and smelled of dry ferns and mud.

You were hiding behind a petrified tree log, watching a herd of Placerias—thickset, tusked dicynodonts—grunting as they dug for water in a dried-up riverbed. The silence of the afternoon was suddenly broken not by a sound, but by a shift in the environment. The Placerias froze, their snouts raising to scent the air.

Emerging from the sparse, cycad-covered forest and lunging forward to snap onto an unsuspecting nearby Placerias with massive jaws, was not a dinosaur, but the apex predator of this world: a Postosuchus.

It was a massive beast, roughly 20 feet (6 meters) long, moving with a sinister, upright, stance, holding its body up and its front paws high, almost like a dinosaur rather than crawling like a modern crocodile. Its scales were covered in maroon bony plates—osteoderms—that looked like heavy, jagged armor.

As the Placerias herd panicked as they struggle to find quick footing in the mud, the targetted individual fought back, attempting to use its weight and tusks against the predator, but it was already wounded and slow. A combination of shock, severe muscle damage from the powerful bite, and bleeding quickly took the animal’s toll. Within minutes, the heavy herbivore collapsed into the mud, exhausted and fatally injured.

The Postosuchus stood over its kill, panting in the heat, the herd already fleeing into the distance. You can see it had won the battle, securing a massive meal that would sustain it through the brutal dry season. But you are not out of the woods yet, as you continue to stand there watching the Postosuchus beginning to feast on its fresh kill, its reptilian eyes briefly locking onto you…