Kryptops is a genus of abelisaurid theropod dinosaur that lived throughout what is now North Africa during the middle Cretaceous period some 115 to 105 million years ago. The holotype specimen consisting of a partial skull, some ribs, vertebrae, and an articulated pelvic girdle and sacrum where unearthed in 2000 at the Gadoufaoua locality in the western Ténéré Desert, in rocks of the Aptian–Albian-age Elrhaz Formation by a paleontological expedition lead by Paul Sereno. These remains where found alongside the remains of a carcharodontosaurid named eocarcharia. Hower it wouldn’t be until 2008 that the animal would be formally named and described as Kryptops palaios by Dr. Sereno and Dr. Brusatte. The genus name means "covered face", in reference to evidence that the face bore a tightly adhering covering. With the specific name palaios meaning "old". Reaching around 19 to 23ft (6 to 7m) in length and 1,650–2,450lbs (750–1,100 kgs) in weight, kryptops was a medium-sized theropod and one of the earliest-known abelisaurids. There has been some debate on krytops’s placement and even validity as a genus, as in 2012 Matthew Carrano and colleagues found Kryptops palaios to be a chimera, and that its pelvis and sacrum found some 50ft (15m) from the holotypic skull to actually belong to the carcharodontosaurid Eocarcharia dinops. Yet Sereno and Brusatte performed a cladistic analysis which included these bones and found Kryptops to be the most basal abelisaurid. In life kryptops were likely ambush predators, using a bite-and-hold tactic to hunt large prey such as the ornithopods and sauropods in shared its environment with.