Spec-Dinovember Day 2: Dovakiin, a creature specialized in hunting pterosaurs

During the mid-Cretaceous Brazil was a hotspot of pterosaur diversity. This local abundance of potential prey drove one predator to fill the niche. A spinosaur related to Irritator and Angaturama began to specialize in hunting pterosaurs rather than fishing. This behavior was only opportunistic at first, but within a few million years notable adaptations have emerged. The animal is smaller and lighter than it’s ancestors and its hindlimbs are proportionally longer and more cursorially adapted. These allow it to explosively chase and leap at pterosaurs while they are still attempting to launch. The neck and jaws are longer to reach further up during a leap, letting it catch pterosaurs even further off the ground. The arms are proportionally shorter, as they were less useful for prey capture than the jaws. The shoulders are more mobile than their ancestors’, allowing the arms more range of motion to balance during a leap. The preferred prey of this specialized spinosaur are Tapejarids and Anhanguerids. The former because they are terrestrially competent and initially run to escape, only reluctantly resorting to flight to escape. The latter because their proportions, while great at crossing the sea, make them awkward and slower to takeoff from a grounded position. During lean seasons these adaptations are also useful at capturing small terrestrial game when pterosaurs are migrating or otherwise absent

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Initially my thought of this prompt was to make a pterosaur version of a falcon, but I kind of hit a wall with which clade would most likely produce such an animal. Maybe Dsungaripterids because they’re already pretty heavily built for a pterosaur, but their terrestrial adaptations would make them middling fliers and probably not the acrobats that lifestyle demands, plus I couldn’t figure a convincing path from shell-cracking durophage to aerial hunter. Ornithocheirids seemed a decent choice, as they could follow a path from kleptoparasite like a frigate-bird, to something like a skua, then to actual predation of other pterosaurs. But I settled on a spinosaur because there is evidence of them occasionally feeding on pterosaurs and the image of one of those long-faced goofy dudes doing caracal style jumps sounded neat!