Buitreraptor (meaning "La Buitrera seizer") is a genus of dromaeosaurid dinosaurs that lived during the Late Cretaceous of Argentina at the Candeleros Formation.

Four specimens of Buitreraptor were found in 2004 in sandstone in Patagonia, Argentina during an excavation led by Sebastián Apesteguia, researcher of CONICET at the Fundacion Felix de Azara - Maimonides University, and Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Buitreraptor is from the early Late Cretaceous Candeleros Formation, dating to the Cenomanian-Turonian ages approximately 98 to 97 million years ago, when South America was an isolated continent like Australia today.

Buitreraptor has a slender, flat, extremely elongated snout with many small teeth that lack meat-tearing serrations or cutting edges and are grooved, strongly recurved and flattened.

[1] The discovery of Buitreraptor has also been the subject of discussion among scientists as to the question whether flight could have evolved independently in birds and dromaeosaurids or was derived from some flying common ancestor.

This discovery in the Southern Hemisphere helped scientists to clarify that the dromaeosaur family was more widely dispersed around the world than previously thought.

La Buitrera also yielded remains of terrestrial crocodiles, pterosaurs, the largest known rhynchocephalians, limbed snakes, iguanian lizards, chelid turtles, mammals, and dipnoan fishes [1] Unenlagiines had better capacities for running and pursuit predation than other dromaeosaurids such as Laurasian dromaeosaurids (Eudromaeosauria), which were more stocky and had shorter legs and had an active predatory lifestyle.

Models for Buitreraptor propose that it hunted by traveling large distances in pursuit of prey, which may explain the long-legged trait shared by various genera of Unenlagiidae.

Buitreraptor is characterized by its long forelimbs and hands; it likely relied on them to restrain prey and the curved claw of the second pedal digit would have injured or killed the victim.