Best headline ever

MSNBC.com brings us this wonderful article (with accompanying slideshow!)

Where animals eat you
At these destinations, one misstep and you’re dinner

After barely surviving a lion attack, explorer David Livingstone wrote one of the most vivid descriptions of what it’s like to have the jaws of death literally clamped around your neck, an animal bent on munching you like so many corn chips. The lion “caught me by the shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly close to my ear, [the lion] shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock … caused a dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening.”

Livingstone survived his frightening encounter, but many others have not been so lucky — the hundreds of people around the world who perish from wild animal attacks each year. Despite mankind’s much ballyhooed “conquest” of Planet Earth, there are an awful lot of things out there still waiting to pounce — and an ever-increasing number of adrenaline junkies bent on getting as close to these creatures as possible and (hopefully) living to tell about it.

Source: MSNBC.com
Slideshow: Forbestraveler.com

Some of the places listed are Cape Town, South Africa (Great white sharks), Australia (Crocodiles), Manitoba, Canada (Polar bears), Indonesia (Komodo Dragon) and Tanzania (Lions – the picture shows a lion smirking over its freshly killed zebra, blood smeared over its lips like lipstick).

The creature that sent chills down my spine though, was the Giant Squid in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico:

Dubbed the Red Demons of the deep, the Humboldt squid will devour anything it comes across in the deep, including sharks, dolphins and human beings. With deadly parrot-like beaks and teeth-lined suckers, this is not a creature to trifle with. Growing to more than 180 pounds and six feet in length, the cantankerous squid hunt in wolf-like packs in the southern parts of the Sea of Cortez. Unlike most sea creatures – including sharks – they are not the least bit timid and prone to attack even when not provoked.

Oh joy.