Carcharodontosaurids take their name from their teeth: long, flattened, and finely serrated like a shark's, built for slicing through flesh rather than crushing bone the way tyrannosaurid teeth did. Several genera in the family rank among the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found, with length and mass estimates for the biggest specimens rivaling or, by some measurements, exceeding Tyrannosaurus rex, even though the two families are only distantly related and never coexisted.
Carcharodontosaurus itself, from North Africa, was among the first members described, while Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus, both from Argentina, pushed size estimates for the family even further and highlighted just how large Gondwanan predators grew during the mid-Cretaceous, before abelisaurids became the dominant carnivores across much of the same region.