The Eureka Moment
Okay Folks! This post is in continuation with my Me’gong post and is about how we found a whales fossil in Meghalaya. While carrying out our scientific project work in Garo Hills for the session 2023-24, me and my project partner(also my life partner) Ginia made a significant discovery of a vertebrate fossil bearing fossiliferous horizon within a marine sedimentary rock sequence which dates back to around 40 Million Years. For all my readers from non- geological background, let me briefly state that this was the period when the Indian plate was moving towards the Chinese plate (Refer the paleomap) with the Tethyan sea in between. It was this time when this animal roamed around the marine waters. The fossil find was that of a mammalian primitive Whale. Our excitement knew no bounds.
Initially, we were a bit reluctant to name it as a whale fossil since there were no previous reports of occurrence of this fossil type from Meghalaya in the Northeastern part of India. The study had to be very exact before actually officially reporting it and we did some extensive study related to this. We took technical help from subject experts (some of whom are also our colleagues/friends). Eventually got multiple horizon of the fossilized fragments of whale bones. We collected a few of them for representation purpose and saved it for other experts to work in detail later.
Significance of the find
Fossils are one of the many important direct proxies which helps directly in classification of the rock sequences prevailed during the evolution of the earth at different geological time intervals (calculated in millions of years). In the field of earth sciences, discovering any new fossiliferous horizons unearths many new aspects to the present understanding. Proper documentation adds to the already existing database and this way helps in understanding and building the complete evolutionary spectrum of a particular class of organisms.
This particular find has high significance since Whales as established by geo-scientists, is evolved from land dwelling mammals belonging to the order Artiodacyls with its closest present-day land dwelling relative hippopotamus. It lies somewhere in between while it was adapting to aquatic life as well as while it moved in the ground too since we got fossilized bone fragments of well developed fore-limbs. The study is in very nascent stage. Further detailed study will bring out many new things previously unknown related to the evolution of whales.
Media coverage
To our surprise was covered by both national and regional media. We were highly excited and thankful to God for the timely recognition of our hardwork. Sharing with you all the url links.
