Sea dragons

It was a tooth of a creature that existed more than 100 million years ago. A sea dragon.

This was a canine of an aquatic reptile like no other.

Ichthyosaurs. From the Greek work ichthys for fish and saurus for lizard. Fish lizard. Its search had baited Delhi-based scientist Guntupalli Veera Raghava Prasad to a fossil site in in south India. 

Before tectonic changes and heaving sea-levels, this was once ocean floor. 

The excitement was infectious. We were, after all, trying to rummage for a creature with no resembling counterpart in today’s world. Some as large as blue whales. Reptiles that gave birth to young ones. So odd in many ways, yet, so kaleidoscopically attractive. 

A predator that was once more famous than its superstar fossil cousins with the same last name -- dinosaurs.

Chennai to Ariyalur -- a 4-hour train ride.

Ariyalur was once under the sea: a fact proven by a bounty of limestone stoking cement factories in the area.

An Ichthyosaur tooth that palaeontologist GVR Prasad from Delhi University had found during his first few days of the field visit to Ariyalur.

We walked through cotton fields to get to the fossil sites.

Belemnites. Shells of squid-like creatures from millions of years ago, lay plentiful on the ground.

Shark teeth. This site was once under water.

Anjali Goswami from London's Natural History Museumand GVR Prasad of Delhi University discuss their finds.

Shark-teeth bounty for the day.

The 2016 Ichthyosaur find in Kutch. Photo courtesy: GVR Prasad

More than a dozen researchers excavated this ichthyosaur find -- one of the most complete fossils of this aquatic reptile found in India. Photo courtesy: GVR Prasad

Dean Lomax studying a giant ichthyosaur jaw bone collected from Somerset, England. Photo by Nigel Larkin

Dean Lomax at Mary Anning's grave with a replica of a bone of Ichthyosaurus anningae, a species Lomax named after Mary. Photo by Matt Holmes.

Ichthyosaurs at London's Natural History Museum. Photo by Judy Massare.

Opthalmosaurus at the London Natural History Museum. A fossil variety of this species was uncovered in India in 2016. Photo credit: Benjamin Moon

Traveling trunks

Think of an avalanche, a fossil avalanche. The Siwalik range in north India has surely been hit by one. Forget dig, you don’t even have to scrape the soil’s surface. Massive cracked skulls, fractured tusks and giant fossil limbs are just tossed around on the hillside like chewed scraps of a jumbo feast. 

A stegotetrabelodon, a type of four-tusked pachyderm from a family called gomphotheriidae. These were one of the 160 species of ancestral elephants that walked the earth after originating in Africa.

I was toeing palaeontologist Rajeev Patnaik along the origami of the Siwaliks. These fold mountains, pleated by the grinding of the Indian subcontinent against Eurasia, basically spike the eastern edge of Masol. That’s a farming hamlet just a 10 km-rickety ride from Chandigarh city in north India.

I was told that on this butterscotch-tinted trail we were likely to find bones of extinct proboscideans -- ancestors of the largest animal on land, elephants. Still, I was gobsmacked on sighting the fossils.

En route to Masol.

The Siwaliks.

Bone shards!

Fold mountains of the Siwaliks.

Palaeontologist Rajeev Patnaik searches for fossils.

The rubbled soil easily exposes fossils after a shower.

Fossils.

An elephant skull.

Pieces of tusks.

An elephant limb bone.

More bone shards.

Difference between the cusped teeth of browsers and the taller and more flatter dentition of grazers like elephants.

Stegotetrabelodon.

Deinotherium.

A size comparison of present day Asian elephants and the 17-feet tall Palaeoloxodont.

Anancus, an ancestral proboscidean with one of the longest tusks.

Modern elephants have only four teeth in the jaws at any given time. As this set gets ground from eating grass, the next of the 5 remaining sets move forward like a conveyor belt.

Mleissa in Abu Dabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates in West Asia, that has elephant tracks of a Stegotetrabelodon herd.

The trackway runs for over 270 metres.

A recreation of the Stegotetrabelodon herd, led by a matriarach and including a male deviating from the herd.

Recreation of the walking herd in Mleissa, Abu Dabi.

It’s a deer, It’s a crocodile, It’s a

The deer-like, dog-nosed, hoofed terrestrial mammal Indohyus existed more than 50 million years ago in the early Eocene, an epoch of wet and balmy weather. What did it evolve into?

My train lumbered into Lucknow, a cultural whirlpool in North India, famous for its silken kebabs, exquisite embroidery and soulful poetry.

But I was here for something even more compelling. My trip was stoked by half-a-century-old discoveries in India — finds that deemed the subcontinent as the ground zero of a fascinating mammalian evolution.

I was at the home of 78-year-old Ashok Sahni, the sensei of Indian palaeontology.

“This was in the 1970s,” said Ashok Sahni. “There had been reports that there were large skulls but nobody in India, in fact, had identified them. One of my students — he was a young guy then — went to Kutch and he came up with several fossils.”

Vijay Prakash Mishra is the student Ashok was talking about. He’s now in his sixties. But four decades ago at the age of 21, Vijay Prakash started scouring the desiccated Kutch region in western India.

This white, salt-crusted desert was once a shallow sea, rife with plankton and fish.

“So, naturally we expected marine vertebrates -- crocodiles,” said Vijay Prakash Mishra. “But we didn’t think we would find certain things that were not known from India.”

Ashok Sahni in his home in Lucknow. Ashok deduced some fossils finds from Kutch in western India to be that of whales based on a book about whale fossils in Egypt.

Sunil Bajpai in his lab at IIT Roorkee. Many of these fossils were found in the desert of Kutch.

The Indohyus fossil that Dutch palaeontologist Hans Thewissen studied had a earbone peculiar to whales. It was one of the earliest ancestors of whales.

Pakicetus was the wolf-like, fish-eating, amphibious whale ancestor.

Ambulocetus, literally walking whale, had clown-shoe-like webbed feet that allowed it to paddle like a walrus.

Remingtonocetus was an ancestral whale with a crocodile-like snout and short limbs.

Palaeontologist Sunil Bajpai holding up a fossil of a remingtonocetus.

Another view of the remingtonocetus fossil. This ancestral whale was named after American palaeontologist Remington Kellogg.

Protocetids were primitive whales that had become pursuit predators and started swimming across continents.

Basilosaurus

About 30 million years ago, the modern whales evolved. There were the odontocetes whales like dolphins, part of the toothed-whale family...

and mysticetes like the humpback whales, which forms a part of the baleen-whale family that have hair-like, mouth bristles to filter krill from the sea.

The last supper

About 70 million years ago, a limbless reptile crunched into dinosaur eggs to slurp out its contents, which included a squirming hatchling. But this beanfest collapsed under a wet blanket of mud.

When you think of fossils you imagine grimy skeletons or frozen silhouettes of creatures from eons ago. 

But then there are those rare gems. Fossils that zoom beyond anatomy. That bullhorn behaviour. 

This is a tale of discovery and rediscovery. The chronicle of an extraordinary fossil. One that doesn’t merely frame a picture of the past, but pans into its action. To part the curtain on this drama, we’ve got to travel to Nagpur, a city wedged in the heart of India.

The arid landscape of Dholi Dungri, speckled with rocky outcrops. (Photo courtesy: Dhananjay Mohabey)

The outcrop that entombed the fossil. (Photo courtesy: Dhananjay Mohabey)

The excavated fossil. (Photo courtesy: Dhananjay Mohabey)

The cleaned fossil of Sanajeh Indicus. (Photo courtesy: Jeff Wilson)

A map of the fossil bones in the rock. (Illustration courtesy: Jeff Wilson)

The life-size statue of the fossil in action. (Photo Courtesy: Tyler Keillor)

A replica of the fossil with the statue in the background at the Geological Survey of India, Nagpur.

Dhananjay Mohabey at the GSI, Nagpur.

Jeff Wilson at a fossil site in India. (Photo Courtesy: Jeff Wilson)

Raider of the lost art -- newfound cave-drawings hold pouched secrets

The landscape was a geological crumb cake.  It was a tableland bristling with a garrison of boulders, rocks and pebbles. For archaeologist Jinu Koshy every step was an ankle twist, an accidental shuffle dance.

At some point in the trek, echoes of bleating goats boomeranged. Jinu had come closer to a ravine. He stood at the nibbled edge of this chasm, spying rock shelters.

Early last year, the 42-year-old archaeologist made his first trip to this desolate mesa. The upland was located in the south-Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

A bird’s eye view of an online map showed a rumpled terrain, very similar to a spot nearby that Jinu had helped excavate. That archaeological dig had happened more than a decade ago and had unwrapped some of south India’s oldest rock art on the walls of cave shelters — prime studio pads for prehistoric man. Since the landscapes bore close resemblances, Jinu was sure that this site too could have housed doodling hunter gatherers.

On his debut march across this tableland, Jinu climbed up and down ravines, combing craggy cave walls for ancient art but the Chennai-based archaeologist was left twiddling his thumbs.

Ravines in a mesa located in Andhra Pradesh.

Archaeologist Jinu Koshy sits at the lip of a valley.

The landscape up the mesa bristled with rocks and pebbles.

Rock shelters.

Kangaroo-like drawings?

Images of kangaroo-like creatures. Image courtesy Jinu Koshy

Images of kangaroo-like creatures. Image courtesy Jinu Koshy

Images of kangaroo-like creatures. Image courtesy Jinu Koshy

Real-life Flintstones yabba dabba doo, experiment to trace human evolution

Imagine being shipwrecked and solitary on an island. I know that sounds like a cliched introduction to a reality show. But hang on to that that driftwood.

Archaeologist Akhilesh Kumar flaking a quartzite stone to make a handaxe — a stone tool that is often referred to as the Swiss Army knife of ancient man. Stone-tool experiments such as these have revealed that archaic man came to India much earlier than previously assumed.

Being alone in the wild is certainly a terrifying idea for screen-staring city-slickers because most of us don’t even possess mildly practical skills to survive like Robinson Crusoe.

But for tool-making archaeologists, the real McCoys with Sherlockian skills, a castaway’s life is clearly, elementary. Meet the authentic Flintstones!

This is a story about reliving the past. A narrative about archaeologists rewriting dates of early human migration to India, new-age stone-tool butcherers and a deerskin-clad hunter.

A map of Attirampakkam, an archaeological site close to the south Indian city of Chennai that has been studied for more than a century.

Archaeologist Akhilesh Kumar knapping -- chipping stones to make tools. Akhilesh and Shanti Pappu consider the chips falling off a stone-tool experiment to be critical clues to the past.

The process of knapping involves chipping a stone to create sharp edges and sometimes a symmetrical, aesthetic tool like the handaxe. (Illustration inspired by Encyclopedia Brittanica)

The flakes of a stone tool could serve as a sharp blade or help piece the jigsaw puzzle of a missing tool.

Handaxes are considered as early artistic creations of our ancestors. In the foreground is one made by Akhilesh, a copy of the prehistoric tool in the background that was found in Attirampakkam.

Some of the oldest stone artifacts, crude stone tools, were found in the Olduvai gorge in Tanzania.

Copy of Copy of Handaxes and cleavers, palaeolithic man's Swiss Army knives.

Copy of Copy of Kathy Schick cutting through an elephant hide. (Picture courtesy: Kathy Schick)

Copy of Copy of Bill Schindler trying to spark a fire in one of the episodes of National Geographic Great Human Race series. (Picture credit Griffin Kenemer, National Geographic Studios)

Copy of Copy of As stone tools evolved, they got smaller during the middle palaeolithic period-- a bit like the shrinking sizes of mobile phones and laptops of today.

Copy of Copy of Neolithic tools or new stone age tools were polished and smoother and often attached to a piece of wood to make what is called a composite tool.

Found and Lost: Indian fossil hunters yearn for a safe haven

Vishal Verma is a 48-year-old fossil-hunter and conservationist who lives in Manavar, a sleepy town in Central India, surrounded by rolling hills of pale limestone and dark volcanic basalt.

Dinosaurs once walked on these lands.

The moonlighting palaeontologist had found numerous breathtaking fossils in his lifetime. But one particular kind eluded him — those of dinosaurs.

This is a tale of triumphs and disappointments. The story of an Indian fossil hunter.

Unearthing India's treasure chest of rocks and fossils with Pranay Lal

Scoop a spade through the soil beneath your feet and you could reveal eye-popping, fantastical proofs of creatures that existed a hundred, thousand, million or even a billion years before you.

The book Indica -- A deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent with its vivid illustrations and lucid prose, slices through India’s mountains, rivers, rocks and fossils to reveal the intricate layers of India’s natural history.

In this interview, Pranay talks about the inspiration for Indica, his mentors, the crisis facing geological monuments in India and the recent push for conservation of these relics.