A camera in Russia captured an eagle attacking, and killing, a deer.

Nature is a cruel, cruel place, indeed...and as a camera revealed, an eagle is badass enough to kill a deer if it's hungry enough.

Sure, it was a small deer...but still. The camera trap in Russia's snowy woods revealed the golden eagle pouncing on the Sika deer, digging the talons in, and dragging it to its death.

The deer vs. eagle smackdown was an epic battle of the kind that is usually only theorized about by drunk frat boys...and the eagle totally won.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," the scientist who made the discovery said.

The photos appear too amazing to be true, but they are legitimate, the London Zoological Society says.

The photos were captured via a "camera trap" designed to document rare, endangered Siberian tigers in southern Russia. The camera, situated in the Lazovskii State Nature Reserve, caught an even more rare event, scientists say.

 "I've been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years - this is the first time I've seen anything like this," Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London said.

Dr. Kerley made discovered the deer carcass when she went to check the camera trap. It was about two weeks after the attack, but there wasn't much left.

"I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," she said in a press release.

"It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

Because of the rarity of the event, Kerley produced a paper about the incident. While golden eagles aren't known to target prey that's so, well, friggin' huge, it happens sometimes.

Her study co-author Dr. Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society told press they found numerous, if infrequent, examples of ambitious golden eagles trying to take down bigger animals for prey.

"The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits-their regular prey-to coyote and deer," he said. "The most startling to me was a record from Norway in 2004, when a golden eagle swooped down and carried off a small (about 3 kg) brown bear cub trailing after its mother. Everybody knows not to mess with a brown bear sow with cubs, but that particular eagle was unfazed."

Ummm....yeah. Not messing with a golden eagle anytime soon.

Sika deer are small-the males usually weigh about 150-240 lb and stand about 50-110 cm. This one wasn't full grown. But still, it was no match for the golden eagle. They typically only weigh about 12 lbs, but they can also fly as fast as 160 km per hour and have an eight-foot wingspan.

Dr. Slaight said the image of the eagle killing the deer in Russia was an example of  a "very rare, opportunistic predation event".