Author: Narayan Bareth
Publication: BBC News
Date: December 2, 2002
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2534775.stm
Geologists in India say they have
found an elephant fossil in the Thar desert of Rajasthan, supporting earlier
theories that the vast desert was once a fertile area.
They said the discovery also lent
credence to popular belief that a mighty river, named in the ancient Hindu
Vedic texts as Saraswati, flowed through the region thousands of years
ago.
Senior geologist BS Paliwal said
the elephant fossil was discovered in a village in Nagaur district, about
300 kilometres from the state capital of Jaipur, during gypsum mining.
Professor Paliwal, who is the head
of the geology department at the Jai Narain Vyas university, termed the
find as a "mammoth discovery for the scientific fraternity".
Hidden aspects
He said it might reveal many more
secrets of the environmental conditions of that period.
Professor Paliwal said the fossil
dated back thousands of years, from the middle Holocene epoch.
The remains were found embedded
in a gypsum layer little more than two metres from the surface.
Professor Paliwal said it belonged
to an elephant or its ancestor known as Stegolophodon.
The fossil is a 61-centimetre-long
part of the femur bone, with well-preserved condyles, a number of rib fragments,
a vertebral bone, probably a lumber with a small spine and a large body
and a metatarsus suggesting a size big enough for more than two toes, he
said.
Geography
Professor Paliwal said the size
of the toes indicated that the elephant was about 3.5 metres in height.
He said during the Pleistocene epoch,
India touched Eurasia and there were indications that Asian elephants moved
south due to the prevailing ice-age in the northern hemisphere.
"It proves again that there were
once rivers like Saraswati and civilisations were flourishing at their
banks," Professor Paliwal said.
He added it was possible that there
were sudden climatic changes which altered the geography of the region,
turning it into a vast desert.
Climatic changes
Abrupt climatic changes led to the
blocking of river systems and the formation of saline lakes, he said.
Professor Paliwal said the centuries-long
drought resulted in migration or large-scale deaths of animals.
He said the elephant fossil proves
that there were other animals too in the region as it was not possible
for a single animal species to have existed in such circumstances and climate.
Geologists had a few years ago found
fossils of fish in Jaisalmer, a district further west from the site of
the present find.
These fossils were dated to be nearly
180 million years old.
Geologists said the find was evidence
that large water bodies once existed in the region.
