turing soil for the plants. Differences in salinity, water depth, and vege-
tation lead to multiple habitats, with very different animals in each.
Driving over the bridge, I imagine an Eocene whale lurking in the mud,
looking up at my car zipping by.
On the island, we grab bikes to go to the ocean. The island is so dif-
ferent from the backbay. Kiawah’s soil is like beach sand, with lots of
shells of clams and snails, animals that were alive when they were part
of the seafloor but whose shells are now found in a different environ-
ment. The island is less than a mile wide, but it supports lots of wildlife.
As we walk toward the beach, we see alligators. They consider this
island theirs and are not afraid of humans. They bask in the sun in little
ponds on the island, sometimes right behind the dunes. Those ponds
collect rainwater and are not salty: these alligators live in freshwater.
The alligators remind me of the crocodile bones that we find in Kutch.
They are often associated with seashells. I have always thought that
these were bones of marine crocodiles, given that they are associated
with the shells. I now realize that I should not rush to that inference. If a
future paleontologist were to dig into Kiawah’s soil, freshwater alligator
bones would be both close to the ancient shore and associated with
ocean clams, though the alligators did not live with the marine inverte-
brates.
We cross the dunes, dragging our bikes along, and find the bones of
a gray fox, a mammal that hides in the daytime, in the dune vegetation.
The fox probably hunts rodents and birds in the forested area right
behind the dunes, part of the nocturnal fauna which this diurnal
observer misses. On the beach there are lots of shells, all open halves.
Storms have churned the shells of the dead molluscs, and thrown them
on this beach, and it reminds me of Godhatad, one of our Indian fossil
localities. On this beach, there are also sand dollars, flat relatives of sea
urchins. In India, we always use sea urchins as indicators of an environ-
ment that is fully marine, since they do not tolerate freshwater. How-
ever, these sand dollars are only fifty yards from the alligator pond. This
shore is a patchwork quilt, with very different patterns and colors in
each of its squares, and I need to think of Kutch in the same way.
One of the reasons to come to this barrier island is to see the dol-
phins. Even though I have studied fossil whales for a long time and have
dissected dead dolphins many times, I have never seen wild dolphins.
A Trip to the Beach | 95
We ride our bikes on the beach to the southern tip of the island. Here
the barrier island is separated by a tidal channel from the next barrier
island. Water flows out of the channel fast. The tides drive this process.
As the sea level rises around high tide, the water pours into the muddy
flat areas behind the barrier island, flooding them with seawater through
this channel. As the tide drops, all this water comes out again, as if a
giant were lifting the mudflats and pouring the water back into the sea.
Dolphins are smart animals. They know about the tide, and they know
that with the pouring-out of the water many fish are poured out of the
mudflats, too. The dolphins stay in the tidal channel, catching the fish
that are forced through the channel.
Having an eight-year-old to please, I am worried that the dolphins
might not be there.
“Do the dolphins always show up?” I ask the uniformed ranger. “It
is a long trek for my son.”
“The dolphins will be there,” she says confidently, “right when the
tide reverses.”
We arrive a bit early for the show, and walk along the channel’s edge.
There are dozens of large snail shells: whelks. We collect them. They are
large and beautiful—orange, yellow, tan, with darker gray blotches—
and smell like they have been buried for a while. In fact, when alive, the
whelks are buried in the tidal channel. They only become exposed when
the animal dies and all the flesh is gone. It again strikes me that we
didn’t see whelks anywhere on the beach; they are only here, near the
tidal channel. We pick up several, more than we can carry. For each big-
ger and more beautiful one that we see, we discard one of the earlier
ones. We can’t take a lot of whelks, because we have to bring them back
on our bikes.
With my eyes on the ground, carrying the whelks in my arms, walk-
ing back and forth, I pay no attention to the channel until suddenly—
whoosh. Loud and sudden, it startles me, and a bulging gray object the
size of a basketball disappears. It was in the water thirty yards from me.
A dolphin has arrived—its forehead was all I saw. I drop my whelks and
sit in the sand. The ranger was right. They patrol the channel, coming
up to breathe. The water is so muddy that I cannot see the body of even
the closest one. But I can see the blowhole on the forehead. That is the
only thing that comes out of the water—the eyes and ears are below the
water-line—just that gray bulge. The Indian whales, too, might have
hung out in the shallows, waiting to pick off fish that shot by in the
muddy water.
96 | Chapter 7
We watch the dolphins for half an hour. The sun is setting. The
marshes turn the orange of the whelks in my pile, and then shades of
gray, as we bike home.
I think back to Kutch. At one site, there may be one hill with gypsum
and sirenian ribs, and another hill consisting of broken oyster shells. All
represent different fossilized environments, a stone’s throw from each
other. There, too, the orange sun sets over the Harudi Formation, as it
did forty-two million years ago, when the Harudi was the coast.
a fossilized coast
The Kutchi fossil localities stretch along a C-shaped band about seventy
miles long, circling a central area of exposed land in the Eocene (figure
30). There was a diversity of habitats along this band. Just as in modern
times, the Indian Ocean was to the south of the localities, and a large sea
arm extended around
the peninsula to the west and north. Nowadays,
that arm is dry most of the year and is called the Rann of Kutch, but in
monsoon time it fills with water and turns the Kutchi desert soggy.
In the Eocene, the southern fringe of the localities was closest to the
ocean. The fossil locality Rato Nala is in this area, and large algal mats
with molluscs dominated it, implying shallow and clear water. The algae
precipitated calcium carbonate and thus constructed an algal reef that
fossilized as the Chocolate Limestone. Molluscs that were living in the
algae were entombed and smothered by them, and dead whales and
sirenians sank to the bottom, where they were also encased by algae—
the minerals released from the dead mammals feeding the algae. But
that was just one environment at Rato Nala. There were also muddy
shallows with lots of small water plants, now recognizable as plant fos-
sils. Then there are gray muds with veins of yellow sulfur, apparently
formed in an anoxic environment.
Fifteen miles east of Rato Nala, also on the south side of the Eocene
land, is the locality of Vaghapadar. Here are lots of enormous marine
snails and sirenians, but relatively few whales. Sirenians are excellent
indicators for fossil environments: they are aquatic plant eaters, special-
izing in seagrass. In the Eocene, Vaghapadar was probably a seagrass
meadow, too suffocating for the fast-swimming whales but just right for
the slow-grazing sirenians.
Moving north along the ancient shoreline, into the sea arm, is the
locality Godhatad that I thought of while visiting Kiawah Island. Being
farther from the open ocean, it was protected from the waves and
A Trip to the Beach | 97
Dhedidi North
shal ows
dry at times
sea arm
p
coastal swam
Babia Hill
marsh
Panandhro
Godhatad
tidal flats
Dry Land
Vaghapadar
reefs
Rato Nala
seagrass meadows
Fossil seacows
Remingtonocetus
Protocetid whales
Andrewsiphius
figure 30. Map of western Kutch (India) in the Eocene, with fossil
localities and the environments occurring there. Different kinds of
marine mammals prefer different habitats, and this is reflected in
their abundance at different fossil localities. The white-gray-black
bars show the proportions of seacows and the different whales.
weather out on the ocean, but it remained connected with that ocean.
Sediments and fossil plants indicate that Godhatad was composed of
tidal flats and lagoons in the Eocene.1 It is also a patchwork of environ-
ments, and the most impressive of these is a long hill composed almost
entirely of broken oyster shells. In the Eocene, it was a storm deposit:
the storm killed the oysters and smashed their shells, dumping them in
large piles. Even though there are conspicuous molluscs at both places,
the difference from the molluscs of the Chocolate Limestone is striking.
98 | Chapter 7
At Godhatad, there are no oysters with their shells closed. Those in the
Chocolate Limestone are mostly closed, indicating that they were bur-
ied alive. At Godhatad, fossil whales are found, too; they were either
killed in the same storm, or maybe the storm moved dead whale parts
around, burying them with the oysters, to the delight of paleontologists
more than forty million years later.
Northeast of Godhatad are large deposits of lignite, a poor-quality
coal. These deposits were formed in a salty swamp or marsh2 and can be
seen in the Panandhro Lignite Mine and Babia Hill localities. Plants
died, and did not rot; instead, the plant debris was covered by more
plants and buried. Anaerobic conditions were common, as evidenced by
the formation of pyrite, and a sulfurous smell when you hit the rocks
with a hammer. Panandhro was sheltered from the churning of the
ocean by the land to the south. It represents a forested swamp with
stagnant water in which many whales lived.
Farther to the north, and farthest from the ocean, is the locality Dhe-
didi North. Gypsum abounds here and was formed by the drying up of
a saltwater basin. Many of the fossils are covered in gypsum, suggesting
that whales here died as their lagoon or bay dried up. That process con-
tinues into the present. When the Rann of Kutch dries up in summer, it
Applying the lesson from Kiawah to Kutch, I can now imagine being
here forty-two million years ago. Along a few miles of coastline, there
are lots of different environments, with different plants and inverte-
brates, and different mammals, too. Whales that are common at one
place are rare at another. The sedimentology can teach me about the
whale habitats, and that in turn can teach me about what the whales
needed to live.
Chapter 8
The Otter Whale
THE whale with no hands
Kutch, India, January 12, 2000. The desert of Kutch is mostly uninhab-
ited, except for a few herders, who roam the plain with their flocks.
However, there is that one place that is teeming with humans who are
not pastoralists: the lignite mine at Panandhro. It is a giant open-pit
mine, one of the largest in India. Enormous machines make you feel the
way an ant must feel standing next to a blender—awed by the size, but
puzzled by the function. Hundreds of people work there, and the mining
company built a town for them and their families, as the local villages
could not sustain so many people. This company town—the Colony,
they call it—has straight streets and identical houses, a shopping center,
a school, a playground, and a desalination plant for seawater. Busses
take workers to the mine, identical white SUVs move the engineers
around, and they bark commands at the colorful trucks that are loaded
with lignite and that clog the road all the way to the nearest real town,
about three hours away. By the grace of the mining people, we’re allowed
to stay at the guesthouse. This solves many of ou
r logistical problems: in
a desert, where do you eat, where do you get water, where do you buy
supplies?
In the morning we drive to our field area. Little Indian antelope, the
size of goats but more nimble, cross the road, and we lose centuries as we
pass the occasional villages with no cars or paved roads, water buffaloes
99
100 | Chapter 8
lingering in ponds and used by boys as diving platforms, while their
sisters carry jugs of water to their houses.
As we approach the village of Godhatad, I spot a small dog-like crea-
ture, a jackal, crossing the road. “It is mad, sir,” states the driver, matter-
of-factly.
I assume he infers this from the animal’s being out at this time of day.
But it bothers me. We, too, will be out here all day, far from the car,
looking for fossils. Does the clinic provide rabies shots in case someone
gets bitten? Where is there a clinic, anyway? Does the Colony have one?
From up on a ledge of the yellow Fulra Formation, I look down on
Godhatad. Its twenty or so houses share walls, or verandas, or lean into
each other, as if they are hugging, huddled together to keep the heat out.
They are painted a light purplish blue—periwinkle, my assistant calls it.
The periwinkle stands out against the drab rocks around it. Godhatad
is a Muslim village; half a mile away is a similar Hindu village. Not that
I can tell. I don’t see a mosque, and I don’t see any people from where I
am. Also, the Muslims here mostly do not dress differently from the
Hindus. The women do not cover their faces. They wear the same bright
reds and oranges as their Hindu counterparts, a striking contrast with
the drab and periwinkle surroundings. And nearly everybody, men,
women, Muslim and Hindu, cover their head, to keep sun and dust out.