It was a cool November morning in 1973, and palaeontologist Vijay Prakash Mishra knocked around for fossils along the flat-topped hills in Kutch, Gujarat.
“There had been reports that there were large skulls but nobody in India, in fact, had identified them,” said 78-year-old Ashok Sahni, the sensei of Indian palaeontology and Mishra’s teacher who had chalked out this detective mission.
Mishra spent days trodding around the silvery, salt-crusted desert, trying to spot ancient remains. Finally, he stumbled upon some abnormally large fossils.
“I kept searching and searching,” said Mishra. “Then in some marine rocks I found teeth and bones. But they weren’t of reptiles. These were distinctly mammalian but far more primitive than similar fossils found elsewhere.”
The discovery was the first of its kind in India. These were ancestral remains of the biggest animal on our planet – those belonging to the order of aquatic mammals called cetaceans, comprising whales, dolphins and porpoises.
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