[6] The holotype vertebrae of Titanosaurus indicus were discovered during an exploration to Jabalpur in 1828 by Capt William Henry Sleeman of the East India Company army.

He 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”.

[7] 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.

[1] 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.

[5] He therefore started the Study of Late Cretaceous Tetrapod fossils from Lameta Formation project with support from the University of Michigan, with one of the main goals of locating lost specimens.

Of the two fossils, making up specimen GSI IM K27 / 501, the second, smaller vertebra was split off by von Huene in 1929 and assigned to Titanosaurus araukanicus (now Laplatasaurus).

[15] As the type genus of Titanosauria, Titanosaurus at times became a wastebasket taxon for a number of titanosaurs, including those not just from India but also southern Europe, Laos, and South America.