What this feathered ‘dino-stork’ can tell us about the last days of the dinosaurs
In the fifth episode of our Stones & Bones video series, National Geographic digital editor Nicholas St. Fleur explores how a newly discovered, turkey-sized raptor shows that dinosaurs in South America were thriving right before the mass extinction event.
What was life like before the asteroid impact that brought the Cretaceous to a calamitous close? Were dinosaurs thriving, or were they already dwindling?
Paleontologists have long debated these questions, particularly in North America. Now, more and more clues are helping decipher the final days of the dinosaurs in South America. One such fossilized breadcrumb is the newly found raptor Kank australis from southern Patagonia.
In this episode of Stones & Bones, our paleontology and archaeology video series, we take a look at this scrappy, stork-like dinosaur and the insights its discovery offers into life 70 million years ago.
Discovered by National Geographic Explorer Diego Pol and his team, Kank had a serpentine neck and a slender snout filled with needle-like teeth. It was a fish-eater that waded into shallow waters and snapped up slippery prey, like modern herons and egrets. This hunting style differs from that of raptors of the Northern Hemisphere, such as Velociraptor, which used their sharp serrated teeth to tear apart flesh. The finding suggests that Kank filled a unique ecological role as a specialized piscivore in what was a lush, diverse ecosystem—right up until everything ended in fire and ash.
