This one is for my dinosaur mad son. Ever since Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park released, we all have been captivated by these prehistoric creatures but I must admit that till a few weeks back, I had no idea that there were dinosaurs in India (to be fair my sister had gifted us a book on Indian dinosaurs but I didn’t actually it). We were in a toy shop browsing dinosaur toys from the Jurassic World range when a new dinosaur caught my son’s fancy. It looked like a longish Tyrannosaurus Rex and had a horn like a rhino / unicorn. I picked up the package (below) and read the name - “Rajasaurus” and it was from India!
According to a 2018 Times of India article by arguably the most famous Indian palaeontologist Ashok Sahni, “In India, 25 to 30 genera of dinosaurs are known, depending on how experts wish to club or split the population. In the 1980s dinosaur eggs and nests were discovered along the western boundary of Kutch in Gujarat, through Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Telangana, a geographic record that replicates the finds of dinosaur bones. These constituted the single largest laying ground in the Cretaceous period globally.”
I found an excellent BBC article that explains why we know so little about Indian dinosaurs. Here’s an excerpt:
"I think India's fossil heritage is largely untapped and has been forgotten," says Advait M Jukar, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Yale University and research associate in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. "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. But there are so many gaps that still need to be filled."
And that's because large parts of India have not been systematically explored by professional palaeontologists. 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.
At the heart of many of these discoveries is Ashok Sahni (photo below), a pioneering palaeontologist whose grandfather, father and uncle were all in the field. 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 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. When he bent over to tie his shoelaces, right there in front of him were four or five spherical structures, measuring 16-20cm in length. "These were very weathered, round, roughly of equal shape. I was stunned. Could they be dinosaur eggs?" Indeed, they were the eggs of the Titanosaurus indicus, a large herbivorous dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period. It was the first time a clutch of dinosaur eggs had been discovered in India. Today, nearly 40 years later, nesting sites of dinosaurs have been found all over the country.
In August 2003, Sahni shot to global fame after 20 years of excavating, identifying and piecing together the bones of India's newest species of carnivorous dinosaur, Rajasaurus narmadensis, which is thought to have been 30ft (9.14m) long. But it's Sahni's less glamorous, lesser-known discoveries that have really informed science. In 2010, he was part of a team of Indian, German and US scientists who discovered perfectly preserved insects in amber, estimated to be more than 54 million years old. The discovery came from a lignite mine 30km (18.6 miles) northeast of Surat in Gujarat, and it indicated that today the region could be home to some of the oldest deciduous forests in the world. "The published findings challenged the notion that India was ever an isolated continent," Sahni says.
In the last three decades, Indian dinosaurs have become better known. This modern era of awareness actually started before the release of Jurassic Park. In the 1970s a small band of dedicated palaeontologists from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata, after nearly ten years of meticulous field work, were able to mount a skeleton of a gigantic herbivorous dinosaur, Barapasaurus tagorei in their own premises - see photo below:
Building awareness is hard when this information does not find a place in school curriculums or textbooks. However, filling this void in recent years are individuals from all walks of life – particularly teachers, podcasters and children's books authors. Vaishali Shroff's The Adventures of Padma and a Blue Dinosaur (see photo below) published in 2018 was designed to captivate kids (this is the book my sister had gifted us but I hadn’t read - now I am reading it to my son). Using fiction and fantasy to weave in real details on Indian dinosaurs, it won the Best in Indian Children's Writing award in the environment category in 2019. Since then, Shroff has spoken to hundreds of school children in many Indian cities, acquainting them with various species of Indian dinosaurs and the major discoveries over the years. "I wanted children to fall in love with our country's dinosaur fossil heritage and to make them aware of the fact that dinosaur fossils could very well be in their backyards," she says.
In January 2023, 256 Titanosaur eggs were uncovered in India, revealing more about the lives of some of the largest animals which ever lived. Among the eggs was one containing the remains of a second egg inside it which suggests that these mighty sauropods may have reproduced similarly to modern birds. There could have been more titanosaurs in India than previously thought. Among the 256 eggs found at the site, one in particular caught the researchers' attention. It appears to show a layer of eggshell inside another egg, with its shape suggesting that it had always been this way.
Of superstitions and conservation: Stones worshipped by Indian villagers turn out to be dinosaur eggs (see video here)
Farmer Vesta Mandloi was surprised to learn recently that one of the "stone balls" his family had been worshipping for generations has turned out to be the fossilised egg of a giant dinosaur that lived in central India's Narmada valley millions of years ago. Like Mandloi, many farmers of Padlya village in Madhya Pradesh's Dhar district have been worshipping these roughly palm-sized balls known locally as Kankar Bhairav or stone Shiva. The balls lie in small clusters often at the root of a fig tree in an open field and are considered the guardians of the land and livestock. But after a group of scientists took a closer look, Mandloi found out that the stone he worshipped is in fact the egg of a titanosaur, one of the largest dinosaurs to have existed on earth.
"We were visiting the area in early December to develop a plan for a geological park when we met Mandloi and other farmers," Mahesh Thakkar of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences (BSIP) in Lucknow said.
Scientists believe that the dinosaurs were decimated during volcanic activity around 65 million years ago leaving behind a treasure trove of fossil-rich rocks along the valley of the river Narmada, which stretches thousands of kilometres from Madhya Pradesh to Gujarat in the far west. Large numbers of dinosaur bones, teeth, claws and eggs have been found since the early 19th century and Mandloi's Karkara Bhairav is the latest discovery.
"Many of these fossils still exist because tribal people have been worshipping and taking care of them for time immemorial," said amateur palaeontologist Vishal Verma. A high school physics teacher, Verma has been an avid fossil hunter and conservationist right from his teenage days spent in this region of rolling hills and ancient volcanic rocks where dinosaurs used to roam 145 million years ago.
Even though they are referred to as Kankar Bhairava (kankar means stone and Bhairav is another name for the Hindu god Shiva), these stones are not worshipped in the traditional Hindu way with baths of water or milk. "Once a year near Diwali, the villagers make farm animals like cows or goats walk over these stones to gain the protection of the deity," Verma said.
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Here are my five favourite species of desi dinosaurs:
Rajasaurus narmadensis: Rajasaurus belongs to the sub-family of the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex, star of many a Jurassic Park movie was discovered as recently as the early 2000s.
Pronunciation: raja-a-sore-us
Name meaning: 'regal reptile of the Narmada'
Diet: carnivorous - as a large Abelisaurid, Rajasaurus would have primarily fed upon larger herbivores, such as Titanosaurs.
When it lived: in the Maastrichtian of the late Cretaceous, between 70 and 66 million years. Found in the Lameta Formation of Gujarat, India
Rajasaurus narmadensis was an Abelisaur - so, a kind of theropod with a long body, almost non-existent arms, and thick, powerful legs. Rajasaurus in particular differed from other Abelisaurs in having particularly short legs, making it even more… sausage-like… in appearance than even its close relatives. It had a boxy head and thick neck, which would allow it to have a very powerful bite and strength in the neck to hold down prey. It had a strong sense of smell, as well, to help it to find prey from farther away - allowing it to set up an ambush for said prey when it got too close. It had horns on its forehead, made of bone from the nose, which was probably not extended by skin. It was also a lot shorter than other Abelisaurids - which means that it was only about 7 or so meters long, and maybe only two meters tall, if that. It really wouldn’t have stood much taller than an adult man. Rajasaurus had an especially short neck, which may have allowed it to grab onto prey even tighter than other Abelisaurids. It had very short, four-fingered hands, with claws on the first three of them. Though the legs of Rajasaurus are short, it did have very robust, thick toes, giving it more support on the ground. As an Abelisaurid, Rajasaurus was covered in scales all over its body, with potentially round bumpy bits of bone (osteoderms) interspersed among the scales.
Barapasaurus tagorei: Barapasaurus was a primitive but very large sauropod.
Pronunciation: Bar-rap-oh-SORE-us
Name meaning: 'big leg lizard', tagroei is a tribute to Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore
Diet: herbivorous
When it lived: Early Jurassic, 185-170 million years ago
Isisaurus: This dinosaur is the one most similar to modern-day giraffes. Fungus has been found in its poo!
Pronunciation: iss-ee-sore-us
Name meaning: 'ISI (Indian
Statistical Institute) lizard'
Type of dinosaur: sauropod
Diet: herbivorous
When it lived: Late Cretaceous,
71-65 million years ago
Indosuchus: An almost complete
skeleton of Indosuchus has been found.
Pronunciation: in-doh-sook-us
Name meaning: 'Indian crocodile'
Diet: carnivorous
When it lived: Late Cretaceous,
71-65 million years ago
Kotasaurus: Kotasaurus is known
from a nearly complete skeleton that lacks the skull, so the reconstruction
uses guesswork based on similar dinosaurs.
Pronunciation: koht-a-sore-us
Name meaning: 'Kota lizard'
Diet: herbivorous
When it lived: Early Jurassic,
205-180 million years ago
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In Aug 2023, there was news of a team of researchers having discovered a fossil of a previously-unknown plant-munching dicraeosaurid dinosaur that shaped the prehistoric landscape more than 167 million years ago. Found in India for the very first time, the species has since been named Tharosaurus indicus, after the Thar desert, and the country of its origin. This dino fossil from the heart of Thar Desert holds not one, but two crowns in the realm of palaeontology. Apart from being the oldest known dicraeosaurid, it is also the most ancient diplodocoid — the broader group including dicraeosaurids and their close sauropod kin — in the world. According to scientists, fossils of dicraeosaurus dinosaurs have been found previously in North and South America, Africa and China, with the latter hosting the site for the oldest-known dicraeosaurus fossil dating back to 166-164 million years. But now, the first-of-its-kind discovery of this New Indian Sauropod has accorded India the title for harbouring the oldest dicraeosaurus in the world, rewriting evolutionary history one ancient bone at a time.
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List of all Indian dinosaurs from Google:
