The type material was collected from mudstone deposits in June 1973 and initially identified as a juvenile "Coelophysis bauri". The level of the Dockum group from which the "Protoavis" material was recovered, was most likely deposited in a deltaic river system. The bone bed excavated by Sankar Chatterjee and his students of Texas Tech University, in which "Protoavis" was discovered, likely reflects an incident of mass mortality following a flash flood. Chatterjee, who first described "Protoavis", has assigned the binomial "Protoavis texensis" ("first bird from Texas") to the small cache of bones, allegedly conspecific. He interpreted the type specimen to have come from a single animal, specifically a 35 cm tall bird that lived in what is now Texas, USA, between 225 and 210 million years ago.