Dino card No. 1751 of 2,015

Tawa

Say it: TAH-wah

Name means: “Hopi word for the Puebloan sun god”1

Ate: MeatFirst dinosaursLate Triassic

Tawa was a small, fast dinosaur that lived about 215 million years ago in what is now New Mexico. It had a slender body and a kink in its upper jaw, and it may have been one of the earliest meat-eating dinosaurs.1

Lived

227 to 206 million years ago2

Late Triassic

Fossils found in

New Mexico, USA1 2

Food

Meat1

Length

2.5 m1

adult estimate

Weight

15 kg1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

Tawa's fossils were discovered at the Hayden Quarry in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, starting in 2004.1

The name Tawa comes from the Hopi word for the sun god, and the species name hallae honors Ruth Hall, founder of the Ghost Ranch Museum of Paleontology.1

Tawa had a kink in its upper jaw, between the maxilla and premaxilla, similar to some other early theropods.1

Scientists think Tawa helps show that the earliest dinosaurs evolved in South America and then spread across the supercontinent Pangaea.1

The holotype specimen of Tawa is a juvenile, with an open braincase and unfused bones.1

An isolated femur suggests that adult Tawa could be at least 30% larger than the juvenile holotype.1

AI-made picture of Tawa — An AI-made picture of how Tawa 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.

For dino experts

Scientific name: Tawa
Named by: Nesbitt et al. 20092
Group: First dinosaurs
Family / clade: Saurischia2
Age of the rocks: 227 to 206 million years (Norian)2
Rock formations: Chinle2
Countries: USA2
Fossil records: 3 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Tawa was first described in 2009 by a team led by Sterling J. Nesbitt, based on fossils found in New Mexico.1
Still debated: Scientists debate whether Tawa is a true theropod or a more basal saurischian, and whether it belongs to the group Coelophysoidea.1

Where the facts come from

Tawa hallae (en.wikipedia.org)
Tawa 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.