User:Abyssal/Portal:Jurassic/Natural world articles/41

Artist's restoration of Rugops .

Abelisauridae (meaning "Abel's lizards") is a family (or clade) of ceratosaurian theropod dinosaurs. Abelisaurids thrived during the Cretaceous Period, on the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana, and 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. Abelisaurids first appear in the fossil record of the early middle Jurassic period, and at least one species (Majungasaurus crenatissimus) survived until the end of the Mesozoic era 66 million years ago.

Like most theropods, abelisaurids were carnivorous bipeds. They were characterized by stocky hindlimbs and extensive ornamentation of the skull bones, with grooves and pits. In many abelisaurids, like Carnotaurus, the forelimbs are vestigial, the skull is shorter and bony crests grows above the eyes. Most of the known abelisaurids would have been between 5 to 9 meters (17 to 30 ft) in length, from snout to tip of tail, with a new and as yet unnamed specimen from northwestern Turkana in Kenya, Africa reaching a possible length of 11–12 meters (36 to 39 feet). Before becoming well known, fragmentary abelisaurid remains were occasionally misidentified as possible South American tyrannosaurids. (see more...)