Why India needs a museum for its

fossils
We are losing invaluable palaeontological history because we have
neither a legal framework nor the awareness to protect fossils.
Published : May 18, 2023 11:00 IST - 6 MINS READ

NANDITA JAYARAJ

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Excavating a 50,000-year-old elephant fossil at Gallander village in Pampore near Srinagar,

Jammu and Kashmir in September 2000. The lack of a repository is why India loses large
numbers of ancient fossils every time a field site is destroyed and every time a palaeontologist
retires. | Photo Credit: FAYAZ KABLI/REUTERS

For anyone interested in the history of life on the planet, India is a uniquely
fascinating natural experiment. The tectonic plate that the country lies on
was once stuck to Antarctica, close to the southern pole. About 100 million
years ago, it began drifting northwards, and about 55 million years ago, it
collided with Asia, which resulted in the gargantuan Himalayan mountain
range. “So a fossil you find in India today might be the remains of a life
form that lived at some point close to Antarctica,” said Devapriya
Chattopadhyay, a palaeobiologist at the Indian Institute of Science
Education and Research Pune.

Deep-time biodiversity

When I met Chattopadhyay in 2017, I learnt how scientists like her collect
fossils from geologically rich regions such as Kutch in Gujarat and study
them to reconstruct a picture of the ancient earth, what is called “deep-time
biodiversity”. I also learnt that Indian fossils are at grave risk. Each time
Chattopadhyay embarks on an expedition to Kutch, she witnesses more
and more fossil-rich areas being lost. Some have been converted into
mustard fields, a few have become sites of new building projects or are
excavated for limestone; once, she was heartbroken to find a structure
being built using bricks embedded with fossils. Another time, she worked
at a site with a particularly valuable selection of rocks, only to find out two
days later that the area had been bulldozed to make a parking lot.
The palaeontologically valuable Matanomadh section (also in Kutch) being destroyed for
development work. | Photo Credit: Devapriya Chattopadhyay
Such losses, coupled with the lack of a legal framework governing who has
rights over geological heritage sites, have denied India a prominent place
in the global palaeontology scene. Chattopadhyay and her colleagues have
been campaigning hard for over six years to establish India’s first natural
history museum so that fossils can be conserved better. The campaign
gathered momentum in 2019 when the group met with K. VijayRaghavan,
who was then the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister. News
reports announced that a “high-level inter-ministerial committee” would be
formed to set up the museum. “The Indian Museum of Earth” would come
up in the National Capital Region and would be supported by philanthropic
and public-private funding. Unfortunately, the pandemic struck a few
months after, and four years since, progress has been slow.

Somewhere between the back-to-back waves of COVID-19,

Chattopadhyay—while recovering from a bout of ill health—received an
interesting email from two young researchers: Nussaïbah Raja and Emma
Dunne. The pair were looking for collaborators around the world to
conduct a study investigating biases in the paleobiology database, a global
repository of information on fossil animals, plants, and microorganisms.
We rely on fossils for an understanding of deep-time biodiversity, so if
most of our knowledge comes from only a small region of the earth, it is
likely that we are not getting an accurate picture. Raja and Dunne’s
concerns aligned with Chattopadhyay’s, so she joined the cross-
continental, and incidentally all-women, team of palaeontologists to
embark upon this investigation. Their results were published in the
online Nature Ecology and Evolution journal in 2022.

They found that biases exist. The paper states that researchers in high- or
upper-middle-income countries have a monopoly over palaeontological
 knowledge production by contributing to 97 per cent of the fossil data. And
it is not just natural factors (such as environmental conditions leading to
the better preservation of fossils in these countries) that are behind this. “A
legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth,
education and political stability” is just as much to blame for countries in
North America and western Europe dominating palaeontology.

“India loses ancient fossils every time a field site is

destroyed and every time a palaeontologist retires.”

India is one of the countries under-represented in the paleobiology

database. “India was in a really bad economic situation after
independence,” said Chattopadhyay. “As a result, things like food security
and transportation were prioritised, and many field sites were transformed
into roads, dams, and agricultural land. I see this in Gujarat all the time.”
Also, many fossils of Indian origin are in museums in Europe. These
remain inaccessible to Indian researchers because Indian funding agencies
do not provide funding for fieldwork/museum visits outside India. Why
can we not ask for these fossils to be returned to India? “Because we do
not have a repatriation treaty of fossils,” replied Chattopadhyay. “Even if
we did, where would they send it? We do not have a national repository,
remember?” The lack of a repository is why India loses large numbers of
ancient fossils every time a field site is destroyed and every time a
palaeontologist retires.

Highlights
 India is one of fossil-rich regions of the world, but its geological wealth is under-
represented in the global paleobiology database.
 A study found that high- or upper-middle-income countries contribute to 97 per
cent of the fossil data although countries in the tropics are typically the richest in
terms of such biodiversity.
 Natural factors (such as environmental conditions leading to the better
preservation of fossils in these countries) are one reason for this but a “legacy of
colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth, education and political
stability” is equally to blame.
 The problem is compounded In India because it lacks a research/national repository
for fossils and because there is no legal framework governing who has rights over
geological heritage sites.

Collection protocol

A museum can solve many of these problems. “Many places, in South

America for example, may not match India in terms of GDP and other
economic indicators, yet they have research museums with a proper
collection protocol. Their researchers are free to access those materials.
And most importantly, when a particular field site is getting destroyed,
they have a place to keep these materials for future research. Somebody
might not be interested today, but at some point when someone with the
right expertise turns up, they will be able to access these fossils. This is
where India has a big gap.”
A wall in Kutch uses bricks with fossils. | Photo Credit: Devapriya Chattopadhyay
What would The Indian Museum of Earth look like? The displays would
be a prominent part of the establishment of course, but Chattopadhyay
clarified that what the public sees and marvels at would be just the tip of
the iceberg. “A museum needs a really large space for the research
repository. There should be mechanisms to house incoming collections,
and people who can manage them. We will need curators, facility
managers, designers, communicators, and associated researchers,” she said.
“The museum is not a dead place where you simply dump stuff. It’s a
dynamic entity, constantly using materials to create knowledge about deep
time.” Many of the under-represented countries in global paleobiology
databases lie in the tropics, regions that are typically the richest in terms of
biodiversity. This was the primary reason they were so attractive to
European colonisers.

Also Read | The museum that Biswajit Sahu built in the Sunderbans

By excluding data from the most biodiverse areas and replacing it with a
temperate-heavy dataset, we will end up with a biased understanding. It
would be a loss for global science,” Chattopadhyay said.

Nandita Jayaraj is a science writer and co-founder of the feminist science

media platform TheLifeofScience.com. She is the co-author of Lab
Hopping: A Journey to Find India’s Women in Science.

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