MEANING: Mahajanga lizard
PERIOD: Late Cretaceous
CONTINENT: Africa
Majungasaurus is an abelisaurid theropod dinosaur from Madagascar. Like other abelisaurids, it was a bipedal predator with a short snout. The forelimbs were very short, while the hind limbs were longer and very stocky. It was a medium-sized theropod that typically reached up to 7 m in length and weighed about 1,000 kg. It can be distinguished from other abelisaurids by its wider skull and the single rounded horn on the roof of its skull, which was originally mistaken for the dome of a pachycephalosaur. Majungasaurus was the apex predator in its ecosystem, and is also one of the few dinosaurs for which there is direct evidence of cannibalism.

Majungasaurus is from the Cretaceous. The Cretaceous is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago. It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of the entire Phanerozoic. The name is derived from the Latin creta, "chalk", which is abundant in the latter half of the period.
The Cretaceous was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high eustatic sea levels that created numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct flora and fauna, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. The world was ice free, and forests extended to the poles. During this time, new groups of mammals and birds appeared. During the Early Cretaceous, flowering plants appeared and began to rapidly diversify, becoming the dominant group of plants across the Earth by the end of the Cretaceous, coincident with the decline and extinction of previously widespread gymnosperm groups.
The Cretaceous (along with the Mesozoic) ended with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a large mass extinction in which many groups, including non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, died out. The end of the Cretaceous is defined by the abrupt Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary), a geologic signature associated with the mass extinction that lies between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras.
Majungasaurus is an abelisaur. Abelisauridae is a family of mostly large-bodied theropod dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period, on the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Today their fossil remains are found on the modern continents of Africa and South America, as well as on the Indian subcontinent and the island of Madagascar.
Like most theropods, abelisaurids were carnivorous bipeds. They had short robust snouts, and highly ornamented skulls with bumps, horns, grooves and pits. Their legs were stocky, and in many abelisaurids, the arms are so small as to seem vestigial. Most of the known abelisaurids were between 5 and 9 m in length.