On the trail of dinosaurs in India

A young scientist from Panjab University is to embark on a mission that will take him some 80 mn years back into history when dinosaurs are believed to have freely roamed across India.

A young scientist from Panjab University is to embark on a mission that will take him some 80 million years back into history — the time when dinosaurs are believed to have freely roamed the vast expanse of central India.

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Ashu Khosla of the university's department of geology, awarded the young scientist fast track award for the third time by the Ministry of Science and Technology, will start excavating dinosaur fossils in central and west India.

The monstrous reptiles - some of them going up to 25 metres in length - are believed to have lived in present day Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

The scientist warned that poor people in these areas were excavating dinosaur fossils unscientifically and selling them to foreigners who knew the value of these fossils in the international market.

Khosla, whose office in the university was nothing less than a museum of dinosaur fossils, had already excavated two big femur bones of plant eating dinosaurs called sauropod.

The gigantic bones were 1.2 metres in length and qualify to be the oldest fossil record from Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh.

Unlike the make-believe world of dinosaurs created by Hollywood production "Jurassic Park", finding and excavating dinosaur fossils was a difficult task and required big efforts, Khosla said.

"The terrain of these areas where dinosaurs lived was very difficult and getting the fossils was no easy task. Individual bones weigh nearly 150 kg and have to be transported at great risk on jeeps to the nearest railway station," Khosla told IANS.

Before transporting, the fragile bones have to be protected with Plaster of Paris jackets. Khosla had been working on dinosaurs for 13 years.

Chandigarh recently got its first full-fledged dinosaur museum - the only one of its kind in India - mainly due to the efforts of scientists from the university who had been working on the reptiles for a number of years.

In Khosla's office-cum-personal museum, there are dozens of dinosaur eggs, two complete and two broken femur bones, wrist bones, shoulder (humerus) bones of plant eating dinosaurs, more than 50 dinosaur dung matters (corprolites) and plenty of fossil woods.

Indian dinosaur nesting sites are extensive and found along a 10,000 sq km stretch along the Narmada, from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh to Kutch in Gujarat.

Khosla said the fossil dinosaur eggs belong to the late Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.

These huge extinct animals used to live around lakes and rivers.

He said that volcanic eruptions — which lasted for one to four million years — led to the extinction of dinosaurs in India.

But these volcanic eruptions formed a blanket over dinosaur nests and bones, leading to their preservation for so long.

He said dinosaur eggs from India were similar to those found in European countries, meaning that the reptiles travelled vast distances as the continents had not drifted apart at that time.

Khosla would also work on mammal evolution, which is very important because small mammals were making their origin at the time when these gigantic reptiles ruled.