Representational Image (Great Plains Dinosaur Museum/ via EurekAlert)
Imagine embarking on a quest for the ordinary, only to unveil the hues of the extraordinary! Such a captivating journey unfolded when the Geological Survey of India (GSI), back in 2018, started a fossil exploration programme in the rocky interiors of Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ancient past when dinosaurs and their contemporaries walked this land.
While excavating Middle Jurassic rocks in the Thar Desert, the GSI and IIT Roorkee research teams stumbled upon a long-necked dinosaur fossil that belonged to an entirely new species!
This discovery entailed the fossil of a previously-unknown plant-munching dicraeosaurid dinosaur that shaped the prehistoric landscape more than 167 million years ago. Found in India for the very first time, the species has since been named Tharosaurus indicus, after the Thar desert, and the country of its origin.
This dino fossil from the heart of Thar Desert holds not one, but two crowns in the realm of palaeontology. Apart from being the oldest known dicraeosaurid, it is also the most ancient diplodocoid — the broader group including dicraeosaurids and their close sauropod kin — in the world.
According to scientists, fossils of dicraeosaurus dinosaurs have been found previously in North and South America, Africa and China, with the latter hosting the site for the oldest-known dicraeosaurus fossil dating back to 166-164 million years.
But now, the first-of-its-kind discovery of this New Indian Sauropod has accorded India the title for harbouring the oldest dicraeosaurus in the world, rewriting evolutionary history one ancient bone at a time.
