Pretty tough to be a fish 70 million years ago
1:00 PM CDT on May 29, 2026
Southern Argentina during the Late Cretaceous didn’t have the cool, arid climate it does today. Instead it was temperate, muggy, and teeming with prehistoric life. Snails, fish, lizards, and even a distant relative of the modern platypus lived in the ancient Patagonian rivers and lakes, and all of them may have been lunch for a newly discovered dinosaur: Kank australis.
“Kank lived in a landscape of meandering rivers and streams with seasonal ponds, inhabited by aquatic plants such as water lilies and animals including fish, insects, and various mollusks,” Matías Motta of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum and co-author of a study describing the species said in a statement.
Paleontologists unearthed a smattering of fractured K. australis bones from the fossil-rich Chorrillo Formation in Southern Argentina during a 2018 excavation. Unfortunately, they were too fragmented to be identified until a neck bone was discovered six years later. According to the team, that was the key to identifying the new species.
