Sea dragons Before tectonic changes and heaving sea-levels, this was once ocean floor. The excitement was infectious. We were, after all, trying to rummage for a creature with no resembling counterpart in today’s world. Some as large as blue whales. Reptiles that gave birth to young ones. So odd in many ways, yet, so kaleidoscopically attractive. A…

The story of ancestral elephants and fossil finds of these pachyderms in India.

My train lumbered into Lucknow, a cultural whirlpool in North India, famous for its silken kebabs, exquisite embroidery and soulful poetry. But I was here for something even more compelling. My trip was stoked by half-a-century-old discoveries in India — finds that deemed the subcontinent as the ground zero of a fascinating mammalian evolution. I w…

About 70 million years ago, a limbless reptile crunched into dinosaur eggs to slurp out its contents, which included a squirming hatchling. But this beanfest collapsed under a wet blanket of mud. When you think of fossils you imagine grimy skeletons or frozen silhouettes of creatures from eons ago. The last supper -- story of an extraordinary fossi…

The landscape was a geological crumb cake. It was a tableland bristling with a garrison of boulders, rocks and pebbles. For archaeologist Jinu Koshy every step was an ankle twist, an accidental shuffle dance. At some point in the trek, echoes of bleating goats boomeranged. Jinu had come closer to a ravine. He stood at the nibbled edge of this chasm…

Imagine being shipwrecked and solitary on an island. I know that sounds like a cliched introduction to a reality show. But hang on to that that driftwood. Archaeologist Akhilesh Kumar flaking a quartzite stone to make a handaxe — a stone tool that is often referred to as the Swiss Army knife of ancient man. Stone-tool experiments such as these have…

Vishal Verma is a 48-year-old fossil-hunter and conservationist who lives in Manavar, a sleepy town in Central India, surrounded by rolling hills of pale limestone and dark volcanic basalt. Dinosaurs once walked on these lands. The moonlighting palaeontologist had found numerous breathtaking fossils in his lifetime. But one particular kind eluded h…

Scoop a spade through the soil beneath your feet and you could reveal eye-popping, fantastical proofs of creatures that existed a hundred, thousand, million or even a billion years before you. The book Indica -- A deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent with its vivid illustrations and lucid prose, slices through India’s mountains, rivers, …