Picture a Velociraptor. Chances are, it's running, jaws open, claws out, closing in on something smaller and slower. Now picture one standing perfectly still at the edge of a river, neck coiled, watching the water. That's Kank australis.
A newly described dinosaur from southern Patagonia, K. australis or Kank, lived 70 million years ago, and its bones suggest it hunted like a heron, not like a raptor is supposed to. The findings, published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, add a strange new creature to the dinosaur family tree and challenge the way we think about what raptors could be.
“This suggests Kank may have been an active fisher, contrasting with common portrayal of raptors as agile terrestrial predators, like Velociraptor from the Northern Hemisphere,” lead author Matías Motta said in a press release.
Kank australis Was a Raptor-Like Dinosaur Built for Fishing
Kank belongs to a family called the unenlagiids, small-to-medium theropod dinosaurs found across South America, Antarctica, Australia, and Madagascar. Like its relatives, it had the signature enlarged sickle claw on its second toe. Adults likely stretched about 8 to 10 feet (2.5 to 3 meters) long. But the neck is what sets it apart.
Its cervical vertebrae carry specialized structures seen today almost exclusively in birds that hunt by striking at water, the same architecture that lets a heron snap a fish from a stream in a fraction of a second. Finding those same structures in a raptor from 70 million years ago was unexpected.
The team found Kank's remains alongside fish fossils at La Anita farm near El Calafate, Argentina, suggesting fish were likely a primary part of its diet. Frogs, lizards, and turtles were possibly on the menu, too.
Reseachers first uncovered the fossil in 2018, but the earliest fragments were too incomplete to identify as a new species. It took a neck vertebra recovered in 2024 to finally crack it open.
Read More: Newly Discovered 95-Million-Year-Old Spinosaurus Was a "Heron-Like Beast"
Ancient Patagonia Was a Wetland Full of Hunters
Seventy million years ago, the region that is now the cold, dry steppe of southern Patagonia was warm, wet, and alive in ways that are hard to imagine standing there today. The climate was temperate and humid, with seasonal rainfall, closer to a river delta than the windy plain it is now. Kank worked the waterways of that world, but it wasn't at the top of the food chain.
It shared its ecosystem with Maip macrothorax, a megaraptorid stretching more than 33 feet (10 meters) that may well have hunted Kank in turn. A fisher that was also prey, working the rivers with one eye on the water and perhaps one eye on the tree line.
The waterways it hunted were crowded with other unlikely neighbors. Among them was a semi-aquatic monotreme distantly related to the modern platypus.
A Southern Dinosaur Named for the Sky
Seven unenlagiid species have been documented in northern Patagonia, but southern specimens had until now yielded only scattered fragments that no one could pin to a particular animal. Kank bridges that gap, connecting northern Patagonia to fossil records as far south as Antarctica.
The name carries its own weight. Kank comes from a myth of the Aonikenk, the southernmost Tehuelche people of Patagonia, an ancient giant rhea whose running steps left the imprint of its toes across the sky, forming the constellation the rest of the world calls the Southern Cross. The species name, australis, means simply "from the south."
A creature named for a constellation, found at the bottom of the world, that turned out to hunt like a bird. Some discoveries feel like they were always waiting to be found in exactly the right place.
Read More: With Stubby Legs, the Spinosaurus Might Have Hunted In or Around Water
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: New Unenlagiid From The Chorrillo Formation (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian), SW Patagonia, Argentina
