We are looking for a track across a valley that the car can work its
way through. We drive around the village, but there are no clear tracks
that descend the steep escarpment to the place where we need to go.
Little kids have come out to watch. Except for the government truck
that brings drinking water and the beat-up bus that takes people to
town once or twice a day, cars rarely reach here, and white people are
as common as rain in July. The kids follow the truck, which moves
“dead slow,” as they call it in India, searching its way over the bumpy
cattle track. The driver decides to drive into the village and ask. The
passages between houses are narrow, made for bullock carts, and our
truck is barely able to make the turns. Hearing a vehicle, people come
out, heads around walls, eyes over fences. The driver calls out to some-
one, and a man with two heavy golden studs as earrings approaches.
They talk. I get out a bag of candy, always with me for this particular
purpose. I hold a piece of candy up to the kids and wave. Three boys
approach, ages six to nine, I guess. I give them each a candy. Broad
smiles. One takes off to show his family, the others stay. Some girls
stand further away. They do not dare to come close. I motion one of the
boys to the candies still in my hand and point at the girls, but he doesn’t
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get that I want him to take the candies to the girls. I don’t dare to wave
the girls over here. This is a Muslim village, and one of them is at least
nine or ten. In Pakistan, it would be inappropriate for a stranger to talk
to a girl that age, and I am not sure how people in Kutch feel about that.
I feel helpless. My companions are now all deeply involved with the
directions, so I cannot ask them to help. An older woman stands near. I
lift my candy hand in the direction of the girls and ask her, using my
very limited Hindi, “Teek-haeh?” (OK?) Her weathered and wrinkled
face looks friendly but uncomprehending. This is frustrating.
Everybody else packs back into the car. I need to leave, too. Too bad,
no candy for the girls today. I give a handful to one of the boys, point at
the girls, and say, “Please share.” He smiles again. Has no idea what I
want. Maybe his mother will make him share with his sisters and cous-
ins, or maybe he’ll eat the lot himself and get a tummy ache.
Back in the car, we cross into a low-lying bushy area and park the car.
We walk down through a nala with a muddy bottom, very unusual in
Kutch. The dense bushes are taller than I am, and there are rustling and
grunts from that area.
“Wild pigs,” the driver informs me casually, chewing on a blade of
grass.
I look up. Those are scary, very aggressive when they have babies. I
don’t know if they have babies this time of the year, and I do not want
to find out. The grunts in the underbrush are much too close for com-
fort. I look at my hammer. It seems an insufficient weapon against a
mother pig that feels threatened. I rush and quickly walk across the
wooded area to where the desert takes over again. I like desert—you see
the rocks that have the fossils, and you see the mad dogs and hogs
before they are upon you.
I look back at the hog-infested nala, and across to Godhatad. The
peace of the desert and people of India surround me again. The azure
cloudless sky, yellow limestone cliff background, the periwinkle village
with its red tile roofs, its little lake where the water buffaloes are cooling
off, and the green nala, set against the drab hills. Fossils or not, I love it.
At Godhatad, there is a lot of Harudi Formation exposed, including
the large storm deposit of broken oyster shells. We walk the oyster bed,
eyes on the ground, looking for fossils. I put my backpack near that of
Ellen, the fossil preparator, who is collecting higher on the same slope.
The backpack is heavy with a gallon of drinking water—Kutch is hot—
and then there is lunch, a chisel, glues, dental tools, brushes, knives, and
plaster for encasing fossils for transport. Sunil has put his bag in the
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shade of a rock. I never do that, after having once spent an hour trying
to find my backpack that was too well hidden in the shadow of a rock.
A hot backpack is better than no backpack.
Suddenly, I find a fossil, a piece of a vertebra. Not very nice, but a
good start. I follow the gulley that it was in and run into another verte-
bra. Ellen comes and helps. She finds another one, and another one.
Then Sunil appears. “Hans, I have found something.”
I am slightly annoyed that he expects me to stop what I am doing and
come over.
“Is it any good? I am having some luck down here.”
“There are many bones.”
“Are they identifiable?”
He smiles. “You will see.”
I retrieve my backpack, and we go to a flat area barely a hundred feet
away. Pieces of vertebrae are strewn across the area here. There is also a
bunch of pieces of bone, mostly smaller than a dime. We call them chips.
But no nice, big and complete things.
“Lots of bone, many vertebrae. Did you find anything else here?”
I ask.
He shows me the fossils in his pocket: mostly pieces of vertebrae,
some small parts of bones too fragmentary to recognize, except for a
piece of a femur. One vertebra is from the tail, and it is more than twice
as long as the other vertebrae he has. Interesting. I try to imagine the
animal. Very long tail, not like Ambulocetus, more like a basilosaurid.
Could it be a new whale?
“Sunil—nice vertebrae, lots of them too, but where are all the long
bones, and the skull?”
At this point, there is not even enough to tell that this was a whale.
We need to collect harder here, maybe excavate this place.
Ellen and I walk around in widening circles, figuring out where the
greatest concentration of bone is. Then we put large rocks around the
area with the bones to mark it. We divide the area inside it into segments
and crawl over each one, picking up every piece of bone. We find two
> vertebrae still partly buried, and a larger fossil too. We do not touch the
buried ones, planning to excavate them later, once the loose surface finds
are in the bag. The little piles grow bigger, but there are just vertebrae
and unrecognizable fragments. I will not be able to tell what this animal
is. I have visions of my previous experience in Pakistan. With Ambuloce-
tus it took four frustrating days before the skull was found and the beast
became identifiable. Except for that half femur, we don’t even have limb
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parts after an hour. Knee pads would also be nice—the entire surface of
the ground is covered by little rocks the size of gravel. Geologists call
this “desert pavement.” It is formed when wind blows away the fine
material, leaving gravel and rocks behind. Eventually, all the fine mate-
rial is blown away, and those big pieces cover up the entire surface, keep-
ing the wind from eroding the ground further. Desert pavement is very
hard on pants and knees, and eventually on the motivation to collect.
These dozen or so vertebrae with chips definitely have potential. The
tail vertebrae all seem to be large. Ellen and I now turn to the area with
the concentration of still-buried bones. She digs and exposes more ver-
tebrae, and I work on a single large piece of bone that is also buried.
Ellen loosens dirt and gravel with a dental tool and brushes it away with
toothbrush and paintbrush, exposing fossils buried deeper, leaving tiny
fossils on tiny pedestals. More vertebrae emerge. I would love to have
the entire vertebral column for this beast, but I would love even more to
know what it is. Another hour passes, and the little excavation is a few
inches deep. Sunil has taken off looking for other fossils. The desert is
quiet and hot.
In silence, Ellen and I continue. The big fossil is impressive—it is not
a fossil exactly, more like a big impression of bone in the rock, with a
few little bone pieces the size of a fingernail still stuck to it. The impres-
sion has the shape of a Y, with a very long stem. I hope that it is con-
nected to something nice underneath. I cannot figure out what it is, or
rather what it was before it all eroded away. I lie back, stretching. My
back hurts from hunching over. Ellen breaks the silence. “What is it?”
She has noticed that this bone is irritating me.
“Nothing very nice. This bone bothers me. I don’t know what it is. It
is too long to be a limb bone or a vertebra.”
“Part of the skull?”
“I don’t see it. It can’t be the braincase. It can’t be a snout. It can’t be
a jaw, either—those do not split that far back. I had hoped to see teeth
or alveoli.”
In my head, I run through the entire anatomy of a mammal over and
over again, trying to fit this silly big-Y thing somewhere. I cannot figure
it out. Instead, I take its picture and try to put it out of my head. “Photo
of skull fragment, very bad, not collected,” I write in my notebook, and
leave it.
Sunil comes back with a large rib, a sirenian, but a big one. Its rib is
the size and shape of a banana. I walk over to the spot with him, leaving
Ellen behind. She continues to excavate. The rib is a bust. The rest of the
104 | Chapter 8
sirenian is not there, and I return to Ellen an hour later. She has produced
a large pile of chips, most of which are too small to identify. The hole she
dug is now two feet wide, and none of the chips she has found are part
of a recognizable bone. I am disappointed, and write in my notebook,
“Three hours later there is no improvement.”
I am getting tired of this. “Let’s cover some more volume using the
pickax. We can excavate deeper, and if it is just chips we’re getting, it is
not like we’ll be destroying anything.”
We get the pick, and I swing it to loosen the rocks. After two hits,
Ellen sorts through the loose dirt with her hands to look for fossils. She
finds a bigger piece. It is a piece of the humerus. That is important. It
turns the tide, and my mood.
“Wonderful, a limb bone.” Few limb bones are known for these
Indian whales, and none are associated with vertebrae. Of course, if it
indeed is a whale, we need to find teeth or skull. I hit the soil again, near
where the bone came from. The pick cracks. Hands sift through loose
sand and rocks.
“Wow, a distal tibia, another long bone. Maybe there is a complete
skeleton here.”
We now become absorbed by the digging, and find more pieces of
limb bones, smaller ones, but still. Hours pass. The sun throws long
shadows. Sunil returns to the site, and I summarize.
“So, what we know is that this animal had short, sturdy, squat limbs,
especially the parts of the limbs close to the body. Powerful swimmers,
diggers, and climbers have that, making their limbs into levers to move
in a dense medium. It also had a big, strong, and long tail.” I hold a tail
vertebra next to the humerus. The bone is barely twice the length of the
vertebra.
“Amazing—this guy was mostly tail, with short stubby legs. This is
going to tell us a lot about locomotion in this beast. Powerful tail, for
sure.”
“So, what is it?” Sunil’s comment brings my musings about swim-
ming back to ground level.
“Right. We have to find out what this beast is.”
We only have the parts of the limbs close to the body, nothing below
wrist and ankle. I decide that we should excavate it more, and sift all the
sediments through a screen, to find the smaller pieces, like the hand and
foot bones.
It is time to go. We wrap our bones in toilet paper, like we are making
little white gift packages. Really, this is better than Christmas.
The Otter Whale | 105
Driving to the Colony, we make plans. We will sieve the sediment so
that dirt and tiny rocks will fall through but everything larger than a
pea will stay on the sieve and can be sorted through quickly. We stop at
the small bazaar next to the Colony and go to the hardware store. The
store is the size of a large bathroom and packed to the roof with shovels,
and rolls of wire, but also with rolling pins and griddles. Sunil translates
my description of what I need. There is a lot of back and
forth, but the
man seems competent and eager, and I leave the store with great confi-
dence in the Indian hardware industry.
In the evening, we unpack the fossils. Ellen joins the ant colony that
calls our bathroom home, and washes the fossils in the sink. Now, with
clean fossils, several chips snap right on to the humerus and femur, mak-
ing two complete limb bones. Very satisfying!
Ellen also exposes some dime-sized pieces that are dark gray, not tan
like the other bones. They are enamel—these are parts of teeth—whale
teeth! This is a whale with legs and a strong tail, certainly very different
from Ambulocetus and Basilosaurus. A new species and clearly an awe-
some find.
The next evening we pick up our screen at the hardware store. The
owner meets us outside—the screen is too big to fit in his cluttered store,
and much bigger than I had imagined. It now occurs to me that the
dimensions I specified mean that it won’t even fit in the car. Also, it is
not a screen. Instead, the maker has nailed a piece of sheet metal to the
frame, and punched hundreds of small holes in it—an ingenious solu-
tion to the lack of screen at the Colony. The entire thing costs 45 rupees,
about a dollar.
The driver solves my problem by tying the screen to the roof of the
car. Back at the Godhatad site, I dump three shovel loads of sediment
into our sieve. Ellen and I each grab a side and shake it rhythmically. It
is heavy and dusty work. The shaking throws us off balance; dirt gets in
our boots, and the wind blows it into our eyes. We find fewer pieces
than I had hoped. I forgot my hat, and my ears are burning. Ellen loans
me hers for a while. My voice is still cracking from a cold I got on the
plane, so I eat a lot of cough drops. Sunil calls me “delicate.”
The evening ritual of washing and fitting repeats itself. More verte-
brae and pieces of long bones, but nothing really nice. One of the verte-
brae is nearly complete, but its end has a triangular piece missing.
Another vertebra has an odd triangular lump sticking out. I fit the two
together and to my shock I realize that they go together. These vertebrae
were fused in life. Ellen sees me do it. “A sacrum?” she asks.
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