Carakiller

The carakiller is a polyborine falconid, descended from the mountain caracara, from the Amazon Grassland, 5 million AD, in The Future is Wild.

On a grassy plain, even if the grass is long, there is little cover. Large predatory animals cannot hunt by stealth, so instead they must hunt by speed. Back in the Quaternary, the most famous of the swift-moving grassland predators was the cheetah (the fastest land animal on Earth at that time).

The swiftest hunter of the Amazon Grasslands is a flightless bird called the carakiller.