Qualla: Maevarano Formation

Maevarano Formation: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0. It begins as a drought. For months the rivers shrink to muddy threads, and the animals of this floodplain crowd around the last water, dying where they stand. Then the rains come - and with them the floods, burying carcasses under sheets of sand and debris before scavengers can finish their work. Seventy million years later, that grim seasonal rhythm is why the Maevarano Formation has become one of the richest fossil beds in the Southern Hemisphere. Its rust-red sandstone, exposed in the dry hills of Mahajanga Province, preserves not just bones but whole skeletons, articulated and complete, recording a Madagascar that had already been an island for tens of millions of years and had evolved a cast of creatures found nowhere else on Earth.

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Image: Jonathan Chen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maevarano Formation: A Cannibal in the Floodplain

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eotyrannu5-Returns, CC BY-SA 4.0. The apex predator here was Majungasaurus crenatissimus, a stocky, short-snouted abelisaurid roughly seven meters long with a single thickened horn on its skull. French paleontologist Charles Depéret first named it in 1896 - from a handful of teeth he mistook for a species of Mega...

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Image: Eotyrannu5-Returns | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maevarano Formation: The Frog From Hell

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Todd Marshall, CC BY 3.0. Then there is the frog. In 2008, scientists described Beelzebufo ampinga from fragments of an enormous skull and armored back - a name stitched together from Beelzebub and the Latin for toad. Early estimates suggested it may have grown up to 41 centimeters long and weighed around...

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Image: Todd Marshall | CC BY 3.0

Maevarano Formation: An Island Already Apart

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El fosilmaníaco, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the late Cretaceous, Madagascar had drifted free of Africa and India and floated alone in the widening Indian Ocean. Its isolation shows in the fossils. Alongside Majungasaurus lived Masiakasaurus, a small predator whose front teeth jutted forward like a pitchfork, and the lon...

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Image: El fosilmaníaco | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maevarano Formation: Reading the Bones

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Murray, Alison M.; Brinkman, Donald B.; Gottfried, Michael D.; Krause, David W., CC BY 4.0. Almost everything known about this lost world comes from the Mahajanga Basin Project, a joint effort of Stony Brook University and the University of Antananarivo that has mounted expedition after expedition since 1993. The first season alone turned up hundreds of theropod teeth; ...

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Image: Murray, Alison M.; Brinkman, Donald B.; Gottfried, Michael D.; Krause, David W. | CC BY 4.0