Pengana, also referred to as flexiraptor, is an extinct bird of prey that lived during the late Oligocene in what is now Queensland, Australia. It is known only from a fragment of the tibiotarsus that was collected from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. The tibiotarsus is unusual in that it allowed for the leg to be swivelled backwards and sideways, making it well adapted to reaching into holes and crevices and extracting prey. The genus is only known from a single species, Pengana robertbolesi.
Pengana, also referred to as flexiraptor, is an extinct bird of prey that lived during the late Oligocene in what is now Queensland, Australia. It is known only from a fragment of the tibiotarsus that was collected from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. The tibiotarsus is unusual in that it allowed for the leg to be swivelled backwards and sideways, making it well adapted to reaching into holes and crevices and extracting prey. The genus is only known from a single species, Pengana robertbolesi.
==History and naming== The first known fossils of Pengana were collected from the Sticky Beak site at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, northwestern Queensland. The holotype specimen, catalogued as QM F16865, is the distal end of the left tibiotarsus. A fragment of a femur from the White Hunter site might be referable to the genus on the grounds of its size, age and uniqueness compared to other Australian accipitrids. The Sticky Beak and White Hunter sites are both interpreted as being late Oligocene in age, which would make Pengana one of the oldest known accipitrid from Australia.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).