Titanosaurus (; ) is a dubious genus of sauropod dinosaurs, first described by Richard Lydekker in 1877. It is known from the Maastrichtian (Upper Cretaceous) Lameta Formation of India. Discovery and naming Titanosaurus, literally meaning 'titanic lizard', was named after the mythological Titans. Titanosaurus was the first Indian dinosaur to be named and properly described, having been recorded for the first time in 1877. The type species, T. indicus, was named in 1877, and the second species, T. blanfordi, was named in 1879. Both species were named by Richard Lydekker. T. indicus and T. blanfordi are 70 million years old. Titanosaurus indicus The holotype vertebrae were discovered during an exploration to Jabalpur in 1828 by Capt William Henry Sleeman of the East India Company army. His was one among many explorations for fossils initially carried out by army personnel, medical doctors and priests who chanced upon them just by being “fairly literate and mobile at the time”. He stumbled across the vertebrae on Bara Simla Hill near a British Army gun carriage workshop while searching for petrified wood. Sleeman, employed by the Bengal Army, regarded the bones as curiosities. He gave two vertebral pieces to surgeon G. G. Spilsbury, who had a practice in Japalpur and who also excavated a bone himself. Spilsbury sent the fossils in 1832 to the antiquarian James Prinsep in Calcutta, who realised that they were fossilised bones and then sent them back to Sleeman. In 1862, Thomas Oldman, the first director of the newly established Geological Survey of India, transferred the vertebrae from Japalpur to Calcutta and added them to the collection of the Indian Museum. There, the bones were studied by the Survey's supervisor, Hugh Falconer, who concluded that they were reptilian bones. After Falconer's death, in 1877, Richard Lydekker described the vertebrae as a new species of reptile known as Titanosaurus indicus. The known remains of T. indicus were generally considered to be lost and untraceable by the end of the twentieth century; in 2010 Matthew Carrano therefore established a cast based on illustrations Lydekker made in 1877, as a replacement plastotype, with the inventory number NHMUK 40867. However, that turned out to be a bit premature. In the early twenty-first century, Indian paleontologist Dhananjay Mohabey understood that such specimens were lost only because no serious inventory of the collections had been carried out for generations. He therefore started the Study of Late