needs of the fossil collector into account. As a result, most of Sunil’s
localities are near bus lines. He would often arrive at a site before the
sun was up, wait for it to get light, and then leave when the bus came by
on its return journey in the early afternoon. It gave him little time to
collect, and he was limited in the amount of tools he could bring and the
number of fossils he could collect. The collection he put together is sur-
prisingly large.
We now have a small grant from the National Geographic Society
and are able to rent a car. In India, one cannot rent just a car, one always
86 | Chapter 6
rents it with driver. Naveem is a quiet and gentle man and, importantly
to me, a careful driver. The car is an Ambassador, built in India, without
four-wheel drive. Naveem takes pride in driving it off the paved road
through streams and hogbacks. Only once do these get the better of him
and we end up suspended on the bumpers while trying to cross a ditch.
With a reluctant smile, he tells us that he will not use that track again.
Naveem drops us at Babia Hill, a flat-topped hill with intense weath-
ering on its slopes. The nalas (dry streambeds) are all bone-dry early in
the year; they only carry water in the monsoon season in the fall. Sunil
finds some ribs weathering out of the wall of such a nala. They are lined
up in a row and are as thick as broomsticks. A large thorn bush casts its
irregular shadow over them. The fat ribs immediately identify the fossil
as sirenian, and I notice that another row of ribs is on the other side of
the thorn bush, also nicely lined up. This was a chest, buried in its
entirety. I can’t wait to see the vertebrae between the ribs, underneath
the thorn bush. I hack at the bush with my knife, and the excavation
starts. The vertebrae show that the head side of the beast pointed into
the nala, so the skull was probably washed downstream during some
monsoon flooding. It could have been last year, or a thousand years ago.
On the off chance that it was recently, I leave my backpack with the
sirenian chest and walk down the nala. A short walk down, a piece of
bone sticks out of the bank. I dig into the bank with the back of my
hammer. It is a jaw—I see the cavities for teeth, and, deeper, a tooth!
However, it is not a sirenian tooth but a beautiful whale tooth. I expose
a second tooth with my pocket knife. It is slow going, because the more
appropriate tools are in my backpack. The jaw goes deeper still, into the
wall. To get this out I should get my preparation tools—but I should
really first finish the sirenian chest, and my quest for its head. As I strug-
gle with priorities, Sunil comes and tells me that he has found something
else. I leave my hammer with the jaw as a marker, so I can easily find its
spot in the twisting nala, and follow Sunil. Another short walk, and he
points at a white object protruding from a crack in the nala’s side. The
only tool I have now is my pocket knife. I try to cut away at the red
brown mud. The fossil is bright white, a color that indicates gypsum
here. Gypsum is a mineral that is dissolved in the water, and when it is
abundant, it often replaces, molecule by molecule, fossil bones and
teeth. Environments where this happens are often enclosed bays that are
filled with seawater and that dry up. As the water evaporates, the gyp-
sum concentration goes up, and eventually the gypsum forms crystals
that replace the bones and teeth of an animal. Some gypsified fossils
Passage to India | 87
keep the shape of the original fossil quite well, but some deform it
beyond recognition, and gypsum is hated by many paleontologists. I use
my pocket knife to cut away the sediment around the fossil, and what is
revealed looks good. It is a very narrow bone, with two rows of small
circular holes lined up along its length, like the holes in a flute. Another
whale jaw—the holes are the sockets for teeth!
Overwhelmed, I sit down on the dirt, resting my head in my hands,
not knowing how to proceed. My tools and backpack are at one excava-
tion, my hammer at another, and me and my knife at a third. Getting the
two jaws out will take about an hour each, and the chest will take half a
day. Too many fossils is a nice problem to have, but it remains a problem.
Eventually, I remove the fossils in the opposite order in which they
were found. Neither fossil is similar to the whales I know so well from
Pakistan. The flute look-alike belongs to a relative of the skull in Sahni’s
lab, a remingtonocetid (to be discussed in chapter 8), and the other jaw
is from a protocetid whale (to be discussed in chapter 12).
If Ambulocetus bridges the gap between land mammals and whales,
these Indian fossils could bridge the gap between the Pakistani fossils
and basilosaurids. If whale origins were a puzzle, we previously just had
some intriguing pieces, but could not make out the image on the puzzle.
With the addition of the Indian fossils, we can find enough pieces so
that the image may become clear—as long as we have the time and
money to collect them.
a 150-pound skull
We are back in Kutch a year later, searching old and new localities. At
Rato Nala, the road climbs a shallow escarpment that includes the out-
crops of the Harudi Formation, a belt of rocks, three hundred yards
wide, perpendicular to the road. It was a stretch of coast forty-two mil-
lion years ago. Drab comes in many shades here: greenish, brownish,
yellowish, mostly coloring muds. If you look closely, you see some
brighter veins: thin layers of bright-yellow sulfurous rocks, glassy white
gypsum layers, and nearly black seams of coal, never more than finger
thick. The coal indicates abundant plant growth, marshes at the water’s
edge. To the eye, the most dominant type of rock is the Chocolate Lime-
stone, a brown layer of limestone chock-full of bright-white snails and
clams that indicate that this was ocean floor.
Looking north, beyond the Harudi, the place looks like a barren
moonscape: miles of brick-red, blood-red, and black sandstones and
88 | Chapter 6
Shale with fossil
foraminifera
Shale with plant fossils
Occasional
Chocolate Lim
estone with
fossil mammals
Blue-gray shale
lots of fossil whales
Gray and green shales
Gray and green shales
Gray slits
figure 28. A geological section of the Eocene rocks of Kutch in western India.
mudstones, eroded into irregular shapes that make it hard to walk on
(figure 28). This is the Naredi Formation, which was formed in a period
of intense Eocene weathering. Rains leached the soil, leaving only the
least soluble minerals behind. The dark colors are mostly iron oxides,
rust basically. With all the nutrients gone, modern plants, too, find it
difficult to live there. The Naredi was formed before the Harudi Forma-
tion. Looking south, the Harudi ends at the top of the escarpment.
There, the Fulra Formation appears as a raised plateau consisting of
blocks of hard and bright-yellow limestone with lots of clams and sea
urchins, and snails the size of footballs, but no vertebrates. The Naredi
rocks were formed when the land was exposed by weathering. After
that, the ocean level rose, and the Harudi formed at a time when the
coastline was here: muddy beaches, oyster banks, coastal swamps, and
islands. The ocean kept rising and flooded more land, and there was a
shallow, warm, and very productive sea, as documented by the reefs of
the Fulra Formation. Geologists read the rocks as if they are the
book that describes the history of a place. In Kutch, the book describes
how, as the ocean flooded the land, a continental edge was slowly
drowned.
The Chocolate Limestone forms the top of a row of low plateaus,
flat-topped hills that can be up to sixty feet in height and half a mile in
length. This is a good place to find whale fossils. We spend much of our
time walking along the edges of the plateaus, where fossils become vis-
ible as they erode. A piece of bone on the slope triggers an intense on-
your-knees investigation, head to the ground, scouring the surface. Even
though this area is rich, a good day means having three fossils in your
backpack upon return. Rich in fossils is a relative concept.
Passage to India | 89
I like this place, partly because it is so remote. If you walk away from
the road, you cannot see anything human-made, even though you can
see for miles. The quiet is also beautiful. In the heat of the day, you can
listen intently and hear absolutely nothing for minutes, when the quiet
is just subtly disrupted by the faint hum of a distant insect flying by or
a rare whisper of wind. The atmosphere makes me imagine looking
back in time, when whales swam here.
Suddenly, Sunil wakes me from my musings as he calls from afar. He
is running toward me, reaching me, exhausted, red-faced, catching
his breath.
“Hans, Hans, I found a skull, the best skull I ever found.”
We rush to the place. The specimen is totally embedded in Chocolate
Limestone. We can see only the top of the skull, a ridge of bone that is
the crest on top of a skull, the sagittal crest. It is embedded in limestone;
the bone undulates in a pattern identical on the left and right side of the
skull, wider where the eyes are, and forward onto the snout for about
three feet. It feels as if I am standing on a boat on the ocean, and an
Eocene whale is surfacing immediately next to me, only the top of his
head emerging from the water. Sunil is right. This will be an amazing
skull. The part that is popping out of the limestone is perfect. Our ham-
mers loosen the baked dirt and my whisk broom sweeps it away. The
limestone under our feet is not a massive layer; instead, it is broken up
into large blocks. The piece with the whale skull is bigger than the oth-
ers. It is the color of milk chocolate, with white snails and clams as
marshmallows. But this is better than chocolate.
We excavate around it, and after a few hours, it is clear that the block
is much too heavy to be lifted by one person and carried to the road,
two miles off. We consider breaking it into pieces for transport. But the
limestone breaks irregularly, and the incessant hammering causes cracks
to form in places where they may easily pulverize fossil bone during
transport. No, it has to come out as one piece. Dr. B. N. Tiwari, the third
member of our group, solves the transportation problem. He cuts down
two small trees, and we suspend the block from them with ropes. The
driver takes our car on a circuitous route, finding flat spots, cross-coun-
try, toward us. There are just two hundred feet from fossil to car now.
We suspend the fossil in its hammock. The slope is steep, slippery, and
rock-littered. Like drunken sailors, the four of us stagger down, our
load swaying with every step someone takes. Lifting it into the back of
the car is not easy either, and the car sags perilously under its weight.
But we make it to town. A local carpenter adapts a salvaged box to hold
-SB 2517,
Drawing of
Anatomy of Middle
Two Eocene Cetaceans
, “Cranial
hicetus,
.
utc
is based on four fossils (IITR
K
. Conley
and
and R.W
, seen from three different angles.
Andrewsiphius
Andrewsiphius
Thewissen,
M.
. G. J
S.,
Andrewsiphius sloani
y 85 (2011): 703–18).
and
Bajpai,
aleontolog
“New Skeletal Material of
from S.
Both used with permission of the Paleontological Society
Bajpai,
-SB 2770,
” Journal of P
Remingtonocetus harudiensis
Thewissen and S.
Mammalia),
y 83 (2009): 635–63).
M.
. G.
(Cetacea,
aleontolog
from J
is based on a single fossil (IITR
Skull of the fossil whales
and 3153,
” Journal of P
e 29.
Remingtonocetus
r
2907,
u
fig
Remingtonocetus
Eocene
2724,
from India,
Passage to India | 91
the fossil. We stuff empty, tightly closed mineral water bottles around
the block as shock absorbers. I am pleased with the improvised result as
I prepare the specimen for shipment to the United States.
I am not pleased with the bill. Shipping it will cost over a thousand
dollars. I do not have that much, so I leave the specimen with Sunil. The
fossil finally reaches the United States some years later, and my fossil
preparator spends a full year to extract the fossil from the block, knock-
ing tiny pieces of rock off the fossil with a pen-sized jackhammer. The
result is amazing. This is certainly the most beautiful whale skull that
Kutch has ever produced (figure 29, skull on left).
Chapter 7
A Trip to the Beach
the outer banks
Driving to the South Carolina Coast, 2002. I think of the long-extinct
Indian whales as I drive with my family on a vacation trip to Kiawah
Island in South Carolina. Weedy forests cover the mainland, like the
“dense jungle” of the Pakistani maps, and they suddenly give way to flat
marshes, swamps, and winding river channels at the shore. The bridge
is long, but as we cross it, I can see the ocean across the island.
Geologists call islands like Kiawah barrier islands. They are basically
sandbars that rise above the sea and grow when they are fed with sand
by the waves and currents. Wind remodels the exposed parts, making
dunes, and when plants get a chance to grow and anchor the sand, they
freeze the dunes in place, until a big storm tears them up again. Barrier
islands are long and narrow, extending along the coast. On the land side
of these barrier islands is the Intracoastal Waterway, a low area which
geologists refer to as a backbay. Rivers feeding freshwater into the back-
bay are blocked from the sea by the barrier islands. This creates a marsh
between islands and mainland. Eventually, the rivers cut tidal channels
between islands, spilling their water into the ocean. The ocean fights
back at high tide, pushing seawater into the breaks between the islands
and overwhelming the backbay. Then, at low tide, the flow reverses
again. Freshwater and seawater mix, and the saltiness of the water var-
ies, from very salty near the tidal channels to hardly at all away from the
93
94 | Chapter 7
channels. The flow of the rivers decreases greatly as it hits the backbays,
and with that, it also loses the ability to carry sediment. The rivers car-
ried mud, and the mud is dumped in the backbays, creating a rich, nur-
The Walking Whales Page 14