MEET INDIA’S DINOSAURS
More than 20 species, the largest egg hatchery in the world and a local competitor for the TRex. India’s prehistoric treasures will surprise you
Some 190 million years ago, in what is now Telangana, six dinosaurs set out on the last journey of their lives. The world was a different place. There were no Himalayas in the north. Ferns, palms and coniferous plants were everywhere. India herself was in the southern hemisphere, still fused with Africa, Australia and South America.
The dinosaurs would have taken big strides – they certainly had the legs for it – but didn’t get to their destination. Something, possibly a flash flood, struck mid-way, uprooting trees and killing everything in its path. The herd died together, decomposing quietly, their skeletons falling apart as layers of earth began to cover them.
That’s how Indian researchers discovered them 57 years ago. About 300 bones were unearthed near Pochampalli village, the only known evidence of a species eventually named Barapasaurus, and one of a handful of dinosaur types that India can call her own.
“Dinosaurs tested the limits of the planet,” says Vishal Verma, a teacher and amateur geologist. In his spare time, Verma has been digging up dinosaur fossils near his home in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh. He has ended up with three rooms full of bones, teeth and dinosaur eggs.
DIGGING THROUGH DUST
Becoming a fossil is no easy task. Less that 0.01% of living things get preserved in rock instead of breaking down to dust. Finding even a fraction of them millions of years later is rarer still. Worldwide, only about 1,400 species have been identified, 20 of which we know roamed India. They’re only an indication of what came before
“Asia’s first recorded dinosaur discovery was in Jabalpur in 1828,” says paleontologist Ashok Sahni. That’s just four years after the dinosaur was first documented as a species in a scientific journal, in England; and 14 years before the term dinosaur was coined (combining the Greek words for terrible and lizard).
Most early excavations in India were carried out by the British, Sahni says.
By the time of the Barapasaurus discovery in the 1960s, dino bones had been excavated from the fossil-rich Narmada Valley Basin in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Remains have also been unearthed as far apart as Tamil Nadu, Meghalaya and Barkhan in Pakistan.
In central India, nests of up to 24 dinosaur eggs have been discovered, fossilised, in the shallow pits into which they were laid millions of years ago. More than 1,000 eggs have been found. “Geologists consider India the largest known dinosaur hatchery in the world,” Sahni says.
We are also abundant in fossilised dinosaur dung, which offers rare insights into what dinosaurs ate. We have our own apex predators and giant herbivores. They’ve even earned Indian names.
And yet, bureaucracy and apathy can sometimes be harder than stone. The Geological Survey of India has identified 32 sites of fossil importance. But there are no strong laws to protect them.
“India still has no single repository of fossils from that era,” says Pranay Lal, author of Indica, a history of the Indian landmass. Our fossil parks are badly secured, badly maintained. Excavations are haphazard, and recovered objects are often stolen, misplaced or mislabelled.
Hard-won finds are in danger of being lost forever even as individual efforts are on across the country to save them.