Unchanged for 200 million years because evolution couldn't improve the design, the saltwater crocodile is a 2,200-pound ambush predator with the strongest bite ever measured in the animal kingdom. Its death roll can dismember prey in seconds, and it can lurk motionless for hours before exploding from the water at terrifying speed. Dinosaurs went extinct; this thing didn't.

The largest and most powerful of the big cats, the Bengal tiger is a 600-pound ambush specialist that strikes from the shadows with surgical precision. Its jaws deliver a bite force of 1,050 PSI—enough to crush bone like chalk—and it hunts entirely alone, needing neither pack nor pride. Where the lion rules through reputation, the tiger earns its crown through sheer, solitary violence.