An artist's illustration of the Dineobellator notohesperus, which lived on Earth shortly before the mass dinosaur extinction event (Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy)

When Robert Sullivan, a research associate at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, found some dinosaur bones in 67-million year-old Cretaceous rocks in New Mexico's San Juan Basin, in 2008, he had little idea they belonged to a new raptor species. More significantly, the feathered dinosaur roamed southern North America just prior to the mass extinction event, when most raptors had already disappeared from the fossil record.