Dino card No. 1739 of 2,027

Talos

Say it: TAY-los

Name means: “mythological Greek giant who protected Crete, also a play on the word talon”1

Ate: MeatRaptorsLate Cretaceous

Talos was a small, feathered dinosaur that lived about 76 million years ago. It was a fast runner with a big claw on its foot, and scientists think it was one of the closest dinosaur relatives of birds.1

Lived

84 to 72 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Utah, USA (Kaiparowits Formation)1

Food

Meat2

Length

2 m1

estimated total length

Weight

38 kg1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

How heavy was it?

as heavy as 10 house cats

as long as 4 house cats nose to tailas long as 11 bananas end to endas heavy as 8 watermelons

How big was Talos compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Talos is known from a partial skeleton that includes parts of the spine, arms, hips, and legs.1

The fossil of Talos shows a healed injury on one of its foot bones, possibly from a fight or a struggle with prey.1

Talos was a troodontid, a group of dinosaurs known for having big brains and being very bird-like.1

It lived alongside other unique dinosaurs like the horned Utahceratops and the tyrannosaur Teratophoneus.1

Scientists think Talos was about 2 metres long and weighed around 38 kilograms, about as heavy as a large dog.1

The name Talos also sounds like 'talon' because of the big, hooked claw on its second toe.1

AI-made picture of Talos — An AI-made picture of how Talos 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: Talos
Named by: Zanno et al. 20113
Group: Raptors
Family / clade: Troodontidae3
Classification: Theropoda > Troodontidae3
Age of the rocks: 84 to 72 million years (Campanian)3
Rock formations: Kaiparowits3
Countries: USA3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Talos was named in 2011 by a team led by Lindsay Zanno. The skeleton was found in the Kaiparowits Formation in Utah, USA, in an area called 'The Blues'.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how many different kinds of troodontids lived in North America, because their fossils are rare and often incomplete.1

Where the facts come from

A New Troodontid Theropod, Talos sampsoni gen. et sp. nov., from the Upper Cretaceous Western Interior Basin of North America | PLOS One (journals.plos.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Talos 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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