During a recent visit to National Geographic headquarters, Pol told me that back in 2019, his team had found a fossil that screamed raptor because it was a fragment of the iconic kill\u00a0claw on the second toe. They spent years searching for more specimens,\u00a0ultimately turning\u00a0up\u00a0additional\u00a0foot bones, a vertebra, and several\u00a0curved\u00a0teeth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the crucial fossil find came in 2024. As Pol\u2019s colleagues crawled on their stomachs across the freezing Patagonian mountain\u00a0tops, sifting through rocks and dirt by hand, a technician named Gonzalo Mu\u00f1oz came across\u00a0what appeared to be a\u00a0minuscule neck bone. He showed it to\u00a0National Geographic Explorer Mat\u00edas Motta<\/a>, then a newly minted Ph.D. who did his doctoral work on southern raptors.\u202f\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I saw the vertebra, I\u00a0recognized immediately\u00a0that it was a raptor,\u201d Motta says. \u201cI said,\u00a0That\u00a0is a raptor vertebra! We found the fossil that we need to name this animal!\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n Motta and the team celebrated back at the tents with wine and a big meal, eager to find more the next day. But the jubilation was short-lived: When they\u00a0awoke the next morning, the entire mountain was blanketed in several feet of snow.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the worst situation because the snow covered the floor and we couldn\u2019t see the fossils,\u201d Motta\u00a0says. Even worse, the snow made it treacherous for their trucks to descend the mountain.\u202f\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a recent visit to National Geographic headquarters, Pol told me that back in 2019, his team had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[327931,327932,327930,35436,79,117478,201],"class_list":["post-767808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-dinosaur-diversity","tag-dinosaur-stork","tag-new-dinosaur-species","tag-raptor","tag-science","tag-southern-hemisphere","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}