Dino card No. 1600 of 2,027

Sazavis

Say it: sah-ZAY-vis

Name means: “clay bird”1

Ate: MeatEarly birdsLate Cretaceous

Sazavis was a tiny bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs. It was about the size of a pigeon and flapped through ancient forests in what is now Uzbekistan.1

Lived

94 to 90 million years ago2

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Bissekty Formation, Kyzyl Kum desert, Uzbekistan1 2

Food

Meat2 1

Length

0.185 m1

estimated from a bone fragment

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Sazavis is known from only a single piece of lower leg bone, called a tibiotarsus, which is just 4.5 mm wide at the joint.1

It lived about 93 to 89 million years ago, during the Turonian stage of the Late Cretaceous.2

Scientists think Sazavis may have been related to another bird called Nanantius.1

The name Sazavis comes from the Kazakh word for 'clay' and the Latin word for 'bird', because it was found in a clay depression.1

Sazavis probably lived in coastal forests or riverbank woodlands full of Platanaceae (sycamore-like) flowering plants.1

It was an enantiornithine bird, a group of toothed, primitive birds that were common in the Cretaceous.1

AI-made picture of Sazavis — An AI-made picture of how Sazavis might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Sazavis
Named by: Nessov 19892
Group: Early birds
Family / clade: Alexornithidae2
Classification: Theropoda > Avialae2
Age of the rocks: 94 to 90 million years (Turonian)2
Rock formations: Bissekty2
Countries: Uzbekistan2
Fossil records: 2 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Sazavis was named by Russian paleontologist Lev Nesov in 1989, based on a tiny leg bone found in the Bissekty Formation of Uzbekistan.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how Sazavis is related to other enantiornithine birds, because only a small leg bone has been found.1

Where the facts come from

Sazavis (en.wikipedia.org)
Sazavis in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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