In 1982, at a dinosaur site in the blazing heat of the central Indian city of Jabalpur, Sahni remembers covering every inch of ground in search of fossils. Sahni often uses his own funds to power his expeditions – his personal collection of fossils has filled the shelves of Punjab University's Natural History Museum. In spite of this, over the years, major paleontological finds from India have helped scientists piece together critical information to debunk old theories and shed new light on how life has evolved over time.Īt the heart of many of these discoveries is Ashok Sahni, a pioneering paleontologist whose grandfather, father and uncle were all in the field. But there are so many gaps that still need to be filled."Īnd that's because large parts of India have not been systematically explored by professional paleontologists. "India has produced the earliest whales, some of the largest rhinos and elephants that have ever existed, vast beds of dinosaur eggs, and strange horned reptiles from before the age of dinosaurs. "I think India's fossil heritage is largely untapped and has been forgotten," says Advait M Jukar, a vertebrate paleontologist at Yale University and research associate in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In this way, fossils can unravel secrets of an ancient past that we wouldn't be privy to otherwise, but despite the groundbreaking findings that have informed science in recent years, there just isn't enough funding or systematic study of India's immense fossil wealth, paleontologists say. In 2013, a similar specimen was discovered in the same spot and the team is now preparing another paper that describes how the anatomy of Sanajeh indicus closely resembles that of modern lizards. Scientists noted how pre-historic snakes didn't have the ability to open their jaws wide enough to swallow big prey, an ability that some modern snakes have acquired through the process of evolution. The geologist studying the project deduced that the animals had probably been buried in a mudslide – an event that began quickly, without warning, locking away that predatory moment in time.Īnd that's how Sanajeh indicus made its global debut – the words are Sanskrit for "ancient gape from the Indus". ![]() The hatchling was beside a clutch of dinosaur eggs, which were still whole. They not only confirmed the presence of a prehistoric snake, but also found that its jaws were opened wide as if to eat the baby dinosaur – one that had just hatched. In 2013, with Indian paleontologist Dhananjay Mohabey and others from GSI, Wilson co-authored a paper describing the incredibly action-packed moment that the fossil captured. In the years that followed, scientists, paleontologists and snake experts pored over the fossil. ![]() Once there, it took an entire year of cleaning to remove the rocky matrix around its soft and delicate bones. When the time came, he packed it all into a box, and put it in a backpack which he carried with him back to the United States, he says. It took Wilson four years to get approval from Geological Survey of India (GSI), a government-run body that oversees geological surveys across the country, to transport the specimen to the US. There wasn't a facility in India that could do the deep cleaning the fossil required. ![]() Could there be a pre-historic snake in this fossil as well?" "It was like a light bulb had gone off in my head. To make sure he didn't misinterpret it, Wilson looked for the same pattern along the spinal cord. "In this specimen, the bones that I was examining had two little vertebrae with a special connection – something only snakes had," he says. But to his amazement, there was something more. ![]() "It was the first time that the bones of a baby dinosaur and its eggs were found together in the same specimen," says Wilson, an associate professor of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan, US. One of his colleagues had excavated the specimen in 1984, in the village of Dholi Dungri in Gujarat, on the western coast of India. In 2000, while visiting the Central Museum of Nagpur in Western India, the paleontologist Jeffrey A Wilson found himself hunched over one of the most fascinating fossils he had ever set eyes on.
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