Where Giants Walked

An inconspicuous piece of arid land in Gujarat contains one of the biggest caches of dinosaur fossils. SUMEET KESWANI signs up for a royal tour of prehistoric times at Balasinor in Gujarat.

- Sumeet Keswani

When Jurassic Park hit theatres in 1993, it captured the imagination of people around the world. As a five-year-old kid in a small town of Kutch (Gujarat), I wasn’t spared by the charms of a world inhabited by dinosaurs. Around the time I was introduced to the colossal T-Rex and the brainy Velociraptors on the big screen, I made up my mind that I’d, one day, touch a dinosaur fossil. I wanted to hold a tangible piece of that history in my hands, a part of the anatomy of a creature that ruled the Earth until 65 million years ago. It seemed like a pipe dream then, of course. What I didn’t know was that one of the world’s largest dinosaur fossil sites lay unexplored in my home state’s backyard.

Fast forward to 2018: I find myself driving down the dusty roads of Balasinor, a part of Mahisagar district in Gujarat. The terrain isn’t very different from the arid desertscape of Kutch, 400km away, with an abundance of the invasive cactus species, prosopis juliflora. I’m heading to Rahioli village, reputed to be the third-largest excavation site of dinosaur fossils in the world. Their discovery was a matter of pure chance. In 1981, a team of researchers from the Geological Survey of India was studying the area for its wealth of minerals when they stumbled upon remains from the late Cretaceous period. The word spread as quickly in the palaeontology community as it did among the Rahioli villagers. They did not quite understand what it all meant, but they excavated bones and eggs, at will and rather recklessly, and took them home, hoping to make a few bucks some day. “Some locals even took to worshipping dinosaur eggs since they looked like shiv linga,” says my guide, Princess Aaliya Babi, who also happens to be an erstwhile royal from the region.