Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a metre-long bony fish with jaws full of clusters of spiky teeth.
Long extinct, this predatory fish (Megamastax amblyodus) was an ancient forerunner of all animals with a skeleton and a backbone alive today – including you and me – and was the world’s oldest known vertebrate apex predator that lived at the top of the food chain in its environment.
