Rajasaurus | Natural History Museum Dino Directory
Natural History Museum, London
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Museum profile documenting Rajasaurus as a large meat-eating abelisaurid theropod and likely ambush predator of large prey.
Open source
Rajasaurus narmadensis
Rajasaurus was a heavily built, two-legged predator belonging to the abelisaurids, a family of theropods that dominated the southern continents in the Late Cretaceous. It measured roughly 6.6 to 9 metres in length and is estimated to have weighed between about 1.1 and 3 tonnes.
Rajasaurus
Rajasaurus narmadensis
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Weight
1100–3000 kg
Length
6.6–9 m
Diet
Carnivore
Period
Cretaceous
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1100–3000 kg
6.6–9 m
Cretaceous
Bipedal
2.4–3 m
30 km/h
Carnivore
One recorded fossil find, in India. First described in 2003 by Wilson et al..
Sites and counts from the Paleobiology Database
The timeline shows the whole age of dinosaurs – and how much time has passed since. The glowing part is when Rajasaurus lived.
million years ago
Lived 70–66 million years ago
If the whole age of dinosaurs were a single day, Rajasaurus lived at 23:45.
Chapter • Meet the dinosaur
Rajasaurus was a heavily built, two-legged predator belonging to the abelisaurids, a family of theropods that dominated the southern continents in the Late Cretaceous. It measured roughly 6.6 to 9 metres in length and is estimated to have weighed between about 1.1 and 3 tonnes. The skull was short, deep and strongly built – only around 60 centimetres long – and its most distinctive feature was a single low horn formed by fused nasal bones together with a thickening of the frontals. The skull bones were heavily sculptured with pits and ridges, and the jaws carried rows of short, backward-curving teeth. As in its relatives, the arms were extremely short and largely useless, while the hind legs were muscular and built to carry a bulky body. The tail was held horizontally as a counterbalance and never dragged along the ground. Most of what we infer about the animal's behaviour comes from better-known relatives such as Majungasaurus from Madagascar and Carnotaurus from Argentina. These animals had short, compact heads with reinforced skull roofs, suggesting they killed prey with powerful bites and by holding on, rather than by slashing with long, deep strikes. Rajasaurus was probably not a long-distance runner; its limb proportions point to moderate rather than high speed. A figure of around 30 kilometres per hour comes from biomechanical modelling, not from preserved trackways, and should be treated as a rough estimate. Its prey most likely consisted of the plant-eaters that shared the landscape, above all titanosaurian sauropods such as Isisaurus and Jainosaurus. Juvenile sauropods were plausible targets for a predator of this size, while the carcasses of adult giants may have been an important food source. Scavenging was probably just as common as active hunting. The fossils come from the Lameta Formation of the Narmada River valley in western India. The material – parts of the skull, vertebrae, hip and hind limb – was collected in the early 1980s by Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India near the village of Rahioli in Kheda District, Gujarat. It was not formally described and named until 2003, by Jeffrey Wilson, Paul Sereno and their Indian colleagues. The name means roughly "king lizard from the Narmada".
Chapter • Where it lived
Rajasaurus lived in the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian, roughly 70–66 million years ago) in what is now western India. Its fossils come from the Lameta Formation in the Narmada valley, with localities in Gujarat (Rahioli, Kheda District) and neighbouring parts of Madhya Pradesh. The setting was a seasonally dry floodplain with meandering rivers, ephemeral lakes and open, partly wooded ground, sandwiched between the eruptions that built the Deccan basalts. At the time India was an isolated landmass drifting northwards, which explains why its fauna resembles those of Madagascar and South America.
Chapter • Wild behavior
Cathemeral
Whether Rajasaurus lived alone or in groups is unknown. No trackways or multi-individual bonebeds are known for the species. In its close relative Majungasaurus, bite marks from members of the same species have been interpreted as cannibalism, which points towards competition rather than cooperation. The cautious reading is that Rajasaurus was largely solitary, but the evidence is too thin for a firm answer.
The name means "king lizard" in Sanskrit, with the species name honouring India's Narmada River.
The horn on its head was low and blunt – most likely a display structure rather than a weapon.
Its arms were absurdly short even by tyrannosaur standards, a hallmark of abelisaurids.
Rajasaurus is closely related to Majungasaurus from Madagascar, evidence that India and Madagascar were once joined.
The bones came from quarry deposits near Rahioli in Gujarat, a site also famous for thousands of sauropod eggs.
It lived during the Deccan Traps eruptions, the vast volcanic outpourings that coincided with the end-Cretaceous extinction.
The bones were collected in 1982–1983 but were only scientifically described in 2003.
The skull was only about 60 centimetres long – short and deep, not long and narrow like that of many other large predators.
Chapter • Scientific place
Natural History Museum, London
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Museum profile documenting Rajasaurus as a large meat-eating abelisaurid theropod and likely ambush predator of large prey.
Open sourceSedimentology (Wiley)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Extinct taxon; conservation status NE
Open sourcePaleobiology Database
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Paleobiology Database taxon page giving the formal classification of Rajasaurus narmadensis within Saurischia, Theropoda, Ceratosauria and Abelisauridae, with the original 2003 reference.
Open sourceContributions from the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The original description paper documents the holotype and referred material and their fossil localities in the Lameta Formation of the Narmada valley (Rahioli, Kheda District, Gujarat) with stratigraphic context.
Open sourcePalaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Elsevier)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Peer-reviewed sedimentological study reconstructing the Lameta palaeoenvironment as semiarid alluvial plains, braided streams and palustrine flats intimately associated with the Deccan lavas.
Open sourceMuseum of Paleontology, University of Michigan (Deep Blue Repository)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The peer-reviewed paper by Wilson, Sereno, Srivastava, Bhatt, Khosla and Sahni (2003) that names and fully describes Rajasaurus narmadensis, serving as the general authoritative overview of the species.
Open sourceMuseum of Paleontology, University of Michigan (Deep Blue Repository)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The peer-reviewed paper by Wilson, Sereno, Srivastava, Bhatt, Khosla and Sahni (2003) that names and fully describes Rajasaurus narmadensis, serving as the general authoritative overview of the species.
Open sourceMuseum of Paleontology, University of Michigan (Deep Blue Repository)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The peer-reviewed paper by Wilson, Sereno, Srivastava, Bhatt, Khosla and Sahni (2003) that names and fully describes Rajasaurus narmadensis, serving as the general authoritative overview of the species.
Open sourceMuseum of Paleontology, University of Michigan (Deep Blue Repository)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The peer-reviewed paper by Wilson, Sereno, Srivastava, Bhatt, Khosla and Sahni (2003) that names and fully describes Rajasaurus narmadensis, serving as the general authoritative overview of the species.
Open source