Gujarat is India?s wealthiest state and lately it has made a habit out of scripting success stories. The latest one is on a really grand, historical scale. It is scripted in amber, an element prized as highly as gold by ancients like Etruscans. Amber is no less valuable for palaeontologists today, because it usually offers up perfectly preserved fossils. For the first time, such fossil deposits have been discovered in India, in the open-cast coal mines of Gujarat?s Cambay region. What they reveal could literally rewrite the history of India with Asia and the world.
To briefly sum up the hitherto accepted history, there once used to be a supercontinent that we now call Pangaea (with a minuscule minority holding out there was a coexisting megacluster, which has gotten dubbed Columbia as most of the relevant evidence comes from the Columbia river region of the US). Pangaea?s southern half is called Gondwana. In the mid-Jurassic era some 160 million years ago, Gondwana split into several pieces, with what?s now called the Indian subcontinent gradually drifting towards Asia. We have all been taught that the collision of the latter two entities produced the Himalayas about 50 million years ago. Here?s the catch though, that the Indian landmass was supposed to have remained isolated in the interim. Going by this supposition, around 50 million years ago, the Indian land mass should have carried species that were extremely distinct (by virtue of having evolved in isolation). Only post-collision would these have escaped to merge with Eurasian life. The startling aspect of Gujarat?s amber fossils is that while they clearly date back to 50-52 million years in the past, they show unexpected connections between India and Asia that neither geologists nor palaeontologists have accounted for so far.
The scientific team working on the Gujarat amber project includes personnel ranging from the University of Bonn to Srinagar?s Hemwati Nandan Bahugana Garhwal University. This team has thus far found more than 700 arthropod inclusions. First, their amber discoveries confirm linkages with (Southeast) Asian tropical rainforests dating back more than 50 million years. Second, the discoveries confirm a biotic connection with Northern Europe, Australia and the Americas as well. To clarify, these findings fly in the face of the expectation that the relevant period would only put forth evidence of evolutionary ties to Africa and Madagascar.
Michael S Engel, one of the 15 study members and curator of entomology at the University of Kansas, has clarified that, ?What we found indicates that India was not completely isolated, even though the Cambay deposit dates from a time that precedes the slamming of India into Asia.? Study co-author David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History in New York has similarly noted, ?There must have been some connections between India and Asia that geologists aren?t accounting for.? What could these connections have been? One currently prominent theory suggests that before India slammed into Asia, there may have been stepping stones in the shape of small islands that allowed species to hop across before the so-called Himalayan Big Bang. Given that only the surface of the Gujarat amber deposits has been scratched so far, theories about the history of India and Asia and Africa and Europe are likely to get plenty more jibbing in the coming months.
The nature of the Gujarat find brings Jurassic Park to mind. The Steven Spielberg film based on the Michael Crichton book is premised on how DNA recovered from an insect that once bit into a dinosaur is used to bring the likes of T-Rex back to life. Theoretically, fossil-preserving amber could one day yield up such DNA even if most scientists dismiss this as the most extreme of science fiction fantasies. After all, we have seen DNA being successfully extracted from a 17 million-year-old magnolia leaf and a 120 million-year-old weevil. So, even if most serious biologists doubt that dinosaurs can be cloned from fossils, and even if the Gujarat amber is supposedly biologically inert, the fact of its finding raises the hope that much more of Indian prehistory can be bought to life, one day.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com