There was a swarm of them, at least 50. They hissed like snakes and flew over our heads, finally starting to land on us.

The one on my arm resembled a tarantula, completely black and as big as a goliath birdeater. Its fangs were much larger than any known spider as it raised them in the air and was about to bite me before I knocked it back with my machete.

It went into the air and back at me, and I sliced it in half midair. The others screamed in horror and started firing from their mini guns. After a minute or so, they stopped attacking us, and we managed to kill several of them.

I saw them lay on the ground filled with bullet holes, twitching. The wings of these spiders were yellow and had dots on each of the two wings that resembled eyes. Some butterflies have this, which could be used for intimidation, confusing their prey or predators, or even for mating. I saw that the wings were well hidden until they spread them like fangs on their butt and took flight though it seems that they are more of gliders than true flyers.

The spiders also seemed to not have silk, thus being incapable of making webs, I presume. Some of the men were bitten by the spiders, and the bites were much nastier than any spiders in our world. However, I am fairly certain that they are not venomous, as spiders that can glide and are capable of crunching bones wouldn't need venom.

This was all truly shocking and incredible. Spiders with wings never existed, not even in the fossil record, and spiders only attacked humans when provoked. These willingly attacked us and saw us as prey.

I had hoped that because these creatures had never really seen humans before, they might not attack us, just as, for example, with snow leopards, where we are so different from the prey they hunt that there has never been a snow leopard attack on humans.

Unfortunately, the creatures here are much deadlier due to the harshness of the place they inhabit. If these spiders saw us as prey, I can only imagine how scary the bigger creatures would be.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead, but before I could compose myself, something hit me on my leg. I looked down, and we were all astonished to see the ground filled with several small creatures that began eating the dead spiders. We all decided it was best to move away and quickly reached an obstacle: a river.

It was best for us to simply set up camp here, and we began building a raft. The only way to reach the center was through the river, and as expected, we weren't alone.

In the shallows were what I believe are... birds.

They were flightless, three meters tall, with a swan-like head and long neck, but they lacked feathers, only having pink skin that was covered in slime and smelled like fish from far away.

The weirdest part was their supposed wings, which were more like arms, similar to those of theropod dinosaurs and had no feathers. They so odd pure skin and bone.

Their 2 arms looked essentially a long, sharp quill, identical to a knife, which they used to hunt fish. Another thing that differentiated this animal from other birds was that it had small sharp shark-teeth on its beak and tongue, seemingly to help grip onto fish better.

We saw 5 of them and one swallowed the fish and regurgitated the bones, leaving them on the shore. One of the tiny creatures that was eating the dead spiders then came to the shore and started munching on the bones. They must be scavengers.

This time, I got a good look at the animal. It was the size of a house cat, with a black scaly body and a red head. It had unretractable claws, a tail, and two crocodile-like eyes. Its canine teeth were also large, so big that its lips couldn't hide them.

The bird-like animal lunged forward with its neck, grabbed the tiny creature, biting its neck. However, the tough skin proved to be too hard, so the bird-like animal simply swallowed the tiny creature and regurgitated the bones. Everyone stared at this with horrifying fascination. We all decided it was best to keep our distance from this creature.

After the five of them ventured further away from us, I used the chance to inspect the skull of the tiny creature, and I was amazed. While I did not know the genus of the other creatures, even the ones that looked like spiders and birds could not be the same species.

There are plenty of animals that look identical but are completely different species. The tiny creature, which had a black body and red head, I initially suspected to be a sort of lizard, but from the skull, it was obvious that it was a mammal.

Mammals have one hole in their skull, while reptiles have two or three. Mammals did used to look like reptiles 280 million years ago. The famous Dimetrodon was believed to be a dinosaur then a reptile, but it ended up being a mammal because it has only one hole in its skull, just like this creature.

But mammals haven't looked like that for almost 250 million years, the isolation of this island caused evolution so bizarre from what we're used to.

The discovery opens the floodgates for so much research. Finding such new diverse animals made me feel like an excited little kid, but I was old enough to know that if the creatures on the lower side of the food chain are this deadly, God knows what the apex predators will be like.