While birds are the best-known animals with this fused bone, they were not the only group and not even the first to have it: in a remarkable case of parallel evolution, a tarsometatarsus was also present in the Heterodontosauridae, a group of tiny ornithopod dinosaurs quite unrelated to birds.
Though most material is from Late Pleistocene deposits unearthed by Storrs L. Olson, David B. Wingate and others in the Admirals Cave, the Wilkinson Quarry, and in the Walsingham Sink Cave in Hamilton Parish in Bermuda in 1981 there is one bone, a tarsometatarsus from a juvenile, which is from a Holocene layer in the Spittal Pond.
It is only known with certainty from a single specimen, the rather abraded proximal part of a left tarsometatarsus which was found at Carmanah Point on Vancouver Island (Canada), where the Juan de Fuca Strait opens into the Pacific.
There is a single foramen on the dorsal side of the tarsometatarsus, with a plantar exit hole between the third and fourth metacarpal's distal ends (presumably for the outer toe's adductor tendon) and another (presumably for nerves and blood vessels) on the plantar surface of the tarsometatarsus.
A fossil proximal right tarsometatarsus (MNZ S42800) was found at the Manuherikia River in Otago, New Zealand.
The holotype is a right tarsometatarsus (AU 7102.20 in the collections of the Auckland University Geology Department) collected on 25 August 1978 from the Ruakuri Cave in the Waitomo District of the North Island of New Zealand.
There exists a fossil bone, a distal piece of tarsometatarsus found in the Edson Beds of Sherman County, Kansas.
The only known specimen (USNM 16809), a distal right tarsometatarsus end, was found in the Cooper River near Drum Island at Charleston, South Carolina (USA).