Qualla: Cajual Island

Cajual Island: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of each day, one of the richest dinosaur bonebeds in Brazil is under two metres of seawater. The Laje do Coringa is a shelf of Cretaceous rock on the shore of Cajual Island, in the Baía de São Marcos off Maranhão, and the tides of that bay are large enough to swallow it and spit it back out twice daily. Paleontologists work it in windows of a few hours. Whatever the sea has loosened since the last low tide is what they get, and whatever they miss, the next tide takes.

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Cajual Island: A Bonebed the Sea Is Grinding Up

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Laje do Coringa is not a graveyard of articulated skeletons. It is a concentration of hundreds of isolated bones and teeth, tumbled and broken, exposed in the Alcântara Formation of the São Luís-Grajaú Basin. Wave action has done most of the damage and continues to do it. That ma...

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Cajual Island: Oxalaia quilombensis

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1999 the site gave up a pair of fused premaxillae - the front of an upper jaw - from an enormous predator. Alexander Kellner and colleagues formally described it in 2011 as Oxalaia quilombensis, from the holotype MN 6117-V, with a maxilla fragment, MN 6119-V, referred to the s...

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Cajual Island: Is It Its Own Animal?

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The status of Oxalaia is not settled, and honesty requires saying so. In 2020 Smyth and colleagues argued it was nothing more than a junior synonym of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the distinguishing features attributable to variation between individuals rather than between species. S...

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Cajual Island: The Same Animals as Morocco

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What surrounds Oxalaia in the deposit is as interesting as the animal itself. The Alcântara Formation has produced the giant coelacanth Mawsonia gigas, rays and sawfishes and a range of other fish, pterosaurs, diplodocoid and titanosaur sauropods, a large carcharodontosaur, noasa...

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Cajual Island: The People on the Island

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cajual is inhabited. A small quilombola community lives there, part of a much larger pattern: the municipality of Alcântara, which contains the island, holds over two hundred quilombola settlements - the greatest concentration in Brazil. They took root as the colonial cotton and ...

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