Indian paleontologists are battling the destruction of fossil resources

India's fossil heritage includes a unique sauropod dinosaur. Image credit: WALTER MYERS

Last December, paleontologist Guntupalli v.r. Prasad and his team searched for dinosaur nest remains on a limestone hill near the small town of Bagh in Madhya Pradesh, India. They found a big problem.

As the group at Delhi University searched along a farm, several people from a nearby village gathered to block them. Prasad said locals often believe that the outsiders who linger on their land are government officials who seek to develop and expropriate the land. The locals also accepted Prasad's explanation that the scientists had to leave for safety.

Prasad says that's not always the case. But in India, land grabs by local officials have escalated. "Suspicion and hostility have prevented us from entering fossil sites, which has seriously affected our work." He said.

Inability to enter is just one of the problems faced by Paleontologists in India. "India has some of the world's greatest paleontological resources." Nigel Hughes, a paleontologist at the University of California, Riverside, said his discoveries in the Himalayas guided the evolutionary study of trilobites. But Indian officials have done little to support this esoteric field of research.

With little legal protection, the ruins often fall prey to looting and development. Despite the lack of funding for all kinds of sciences in India, the dilemma of paleontology is particularly acute. Little money is available for the excavation, acquisition and collation of specimens, and the country lacks a national institution that can study and preserve its natural heritage.

All of this is holding young people back from entering the field, said Ashok Sahni of Punjab University, a leader in Indian paleontology, which is cutting or eliminating paleontology courses. Sahni is famous for the discovery of dinosaur nesting grounds in Jabalpur, as well as the discovery of insects trapped in amber in Gujarat. He mentioned that he had witnessed waves of colleagues retiring, but few young people could replace them. "There are not enough researchers, And Indian paleontology is dying." He said.

In 1828, Jabalpur in the Narmada Valley in central India unearthed the first dinosaur fossils found in Asia, which belonged to a sauropod. Since then, the subcontinent has produced a series of important discoveries, from some of the earliest plants, to dinosaurs, to the skulls of Homo erectus, the ancestors of mankind. "We have all the remains from photosynthesis to the Quaternary, and it's continuous." Sahni said.

The abundance of fossils reflects India's long evolutionary path after its secession from the continent of Gondwana about 150 million years ago. During the 100 million-year drift, the land acquired a range of plant and animal species, including many dinosaurs. Then, 50 to 60 million years ago, India began to collide with Asia, and at the edge of the swamp, new mammals emerged, including the ancestors of horses, primates and whales.

Now, this rich heritage is colliding with the reality of India today. At a site in Himachal Pradesh, an expedition by punjab and Yale University in the late 1960s unearthed a large number of humanoid fossils, including the most complete jaw of an extinct great ape found to date. The discovery has helped to gain a deeper understanding of the species.

Sahni said today's paleontologists would love to dig further at the site, but it "has been completely razed" — turned into farmland and many fossils have been lost or sold. It's a familiar story for paleontologists in India.

In the early 1980s, a cement factory in Gujarat was blasted and workers found something resembling an ancient cannonball. The team of paleontologist Dhananjay Mohabey of the Geological Survey of India found that it was a dinosaur egg. Mohabey et al. soon found several eggs in hundreds of nests, along with many other fossils, one of which was what looked like a snake bone from the Cretaceous period.

In 2010, Jeffrey Wilson of the University of Michigan studied these snake bones. He and Mohabey found more fossil fragments and confirmed that it was a rare snake (the Ancient Indian Slit Snake) and that they died around dinosaur eggs. Mohabey said this is the first evidence that snakes preyed on dinosaur pups.

Mohabey and others have documented 7 species of dinosaurs that nested in the area. But locals and tourists soon began plundering the ruins. In the 1980s, dinosaur eggs sold on the street for only a few cents.

In 1997, the local government designated 29 hectares of land to establish the Barassia Dinosaur Fossil Park. But, Mohabey said, poaching has largely unabated. Even now, the park is not fully fenced off, and the museum building, which has been built since 2011, has not yet opened. "I witnessed a beautiful dinosaur lair disappear from fossil park, despite our efforts to hide it." Local fossil conservationist Aaliya Farhat Babi said.

Mohabey said the destruction of the Balasinoor fossil layer was almost complete. "Most important fossils disappear forever. Sometimes, I really wish I hadn't discovered the relic. ”

Decades ago, India said it didn't care about its fossil wealth. In a scandal that broke out in 1989, the country's paleontology lost its prestige. At the time, John Talent, a geologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, accused an Indian paleontologist of fraudulent activity over the past 25 years.

In a letter to Nature, Talent asserted that Vishwa Jit Gupta, a paleontologist at the University of Punjab at the time, claimed to have found discoveries that could not be confirmed later. Talent also accused Gupta of describing it as "Indian" specimens that were actually excavated elsewhere.

To that end, Punjab University briefly suspended Gupta, but after a lengthy lawsuit, Gupta retained his position and retired in 2002. Since then, the paleontological community in India has struggled to regain respect and public confidence.

However, government neglect is a bigger problem. Officials and lawmakers have largely ignored requests to protect the monuments. "Legally, it's a scuffle." Rajeev Pattanayak, a paleontologist at the University of Punjab, said. He noted that there is no way to combat poachers without laws. "We don't even have a licensing system for excavating or collecting fossils in India." Sunil Bajpai, director of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleontology (BIPS) and paleontologist at the Indian Institute of Technology, added.

The lack of legal protection of fossils also allows landowners to close the site at will. One place that scientists "covet" is a lignite mine. Sahni said it was a fossil gold mine. Some of South Asia's oldest mammal fossils have been unearthed here, including horses that appeared on the Indian subcontinent about 54 million years ago — a groundbreaking discovery by colleagues at Bajpai and BIPS. Another team found more than 100 species of insects in 500,000-year-old amber excavated at the mine and other sites.

For years, mining officials allowed scientists to gather information there. But since 2015, the mine has banned them from entering. Moreover, some mines have destroyed fossil sites. In The Papua Mountains of Kuchi, lignite coal mines dumped waste at the burial ground of early whale fossils.

As a remedy for the crisis, Indian and foreign scientists have lobbied for India to create a Smithsonian institution. "India desperately needs a national repository of fossils." Hughes said. Sahni adds that a comprehensive fossil repository is essential not only for public education, but also for disciplines.

Indian officials appear to be indifferent to this. Minister of Science and Technology Ashutosh Sharma said the government was "agnostic compared to various scientific disciplines". The department funds most of india's basic research. He said the Department of Science and Technology is willing to "fill in any policy gaps," but he has yet to see that paleontology requires special efforts to recover.

However, some recent advances in paleontology in India have inspired people's spirits. In February 2016, a team of researchers from Delhi University, Kutch University, University Kiel and Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany published a 150 million-year-old ichthyosaur fossil. Prasad, who led the excavation, said the marine reptile specimens found by scientists in Gujarat were "the first fossil skeleton of a Jurassic reptile from South Asia that is almost complete."

But Sahni and others argue that what the field needs is something more important and harder to provide, not just adequate funding and legal protection for the monuments. India needs to instill in the public respect for the country's paleontological wealth. Moreover, this should be intertwined with improving the way of life in rural India and creating economic incentives to protect fossil sites. "Unless people have a stake in protecting the site, they will continue to be destroyed." Sahni said. (Compiled by Zhang Zhang)