Sazavis was an enantiornithine bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 from the Late Cretaceous

Late Cretaceous

The Late Cretaceous is the younger of two epochs into which the Cretaceous period is divided in the geologic timescale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous series...

. It might have been related to Alexornis

Alexornis

Alexornis is a genus of enantiornithine bird from the Late Cretaceous of southwestern North America. The type and only species is Alexornis antecedens....

and Kizylkumavis

Kizylkumavis

Kizylkumavis was an enantiornithine bird. It lived during the Late Cretaceous about 75 mya and is known from fossils found in the Bissekty Formation of the Kyzyl Kum, Uzbekistan....

and lived in what is now the Kyzyl Kum

Kyzyl Kum

The Kyzyl Kum , also called Qyzylqum, is the 11th largest desert in the world. Its name means Red Sand in Turkic languages. It is located in Central Asia in the doab between the rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya, and is divided between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan...

 of Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....

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There is a single species

Species

In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

 known to date, Sazavis prisca. It is only known from a single piece of tibiotarsus

Tibiotarsus

The tibiotarsus is the large bone between the femur and the tarsometatarsus in the leg of a bird. It is the fusion of the proximal part of the tarsus with the tibia.A similar structure also occurred in the Mesozoic Heterodontosauridae...

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The bone has been found in the Bissekty Formation

Bissekty Formation

The Bissekty Formation is situated in the Kyzyl Kum desert of Uzbekistan, and dates from the late Cretaceous Period. Laid down in the early the Turonian to Coniacian stages, it is dated to about 90-85 ma .The Bissekty Formation is characterised by a mix of marine, brackish, freshwater, and...

. The bird was approximately some 18.5 cm (c.7 in) long in life, excluding the tailhttp://dml.cmnh.org/2001Jul/msg01069.html.