  While the chimera states themselves are usually believed to be chaotic
transients, the involvement of chaos behind their self-organization is not
properly distinguished or studied. In this work, we demonstrate that small
chimeras in the local flux dynamics of an array of magnetically coupled
superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) driven by an external
field are born through transiently chaotic dynamics. We deduce analytic
expressions for small chimeras and synchronous states which correspond to
nonchaotic attractors in the model. We also numerically study the bifurcations
underlying the multistability responsible for their generation. Transient chaos
manifests itself in the short term flux oscillations with erratically
fluctuating amplitudes, exponential escape time distribution and irregular
dependence of the escape time to initial conditions. We classify the small
chimera states in terms of the position of the non-synchronized member and
numerically construct their basin of attraction. The basin is shown to possess
an interesting structure consisting of both ordered and fractal parts, which
again can be attributed to transient chaos.
