y excitement had known no bounds as I boarded my father’s four-wheel drive, predawn on a February morning this year. I was headed off to uncharted territories, properly armed though, with my palaeontologist friend who knew our destination like the back of his hand. Enticed by a visit to the museum, my anticipation had barely afforded me two hours of sleep the preceding night, and the four-hour drive to our destination felt like an eternity. But as we neared Kanhati Garden, snail-paced on a derelict highway, the surge of adrenaline kept my veins throbbing. Here, I hoped to find fossils of millions of years old terrestrial vertebrates in the renowned fossil beds of the historic Siwaliks.

Ever since I first set foot on a mountain more than a decade ago, I have always been intrigued by the treasures they hold. I had been educated about the remarkable discoveries of Baluchitherium - possibly the largest mammal to ever walk on earth, and prehistoric walking whales, both in the Sulaiman Mountains range. And yet, as I had tread on those very rocks for miles upon miles, in utter desolation and destitute barrenness, I had not for once seen with my own two eyes what the remnants of a twenty million-year-old creature look like. I would not be introduced to the world of mammalian fossils until I met my palaeontologist friend, an accomplished earth scientist from the Museum of Natural History.

As we kicked up dust in Kanhati Garden early that morning, the local gardeners eyed us with sheer suspicion. Why would two middle-aged gentlemen drive up to this town, off the beaten track, so early in the morning and from so far away? All our entreaties to be shown the way to Gambhir River would be met with disdain until our secret was finally revealed. The gardeners were satisfied as soon as the word ‘fossils’ was uttered. In the good old times, when scientists and enthusiasts searched these rolling mountains for prehistoric treasures and shared their tales, these gardeners would guide them to the fossil beds through the tricky mountain pathways. Having lent them an ear, we could now assure them that we had come following the same old tradition. This disclosure on our part earned us a guide to take us places in the hills where traces of old beasts had kicked up recently. This, finally rejuvenated both my palaeontologist friend and me.

As our guide, a young lad, had us trundle over barricaded routes, I secretly said silent prayers, for my endeavour now faced its moment of truth. While my friend was expending his energies educating me about the visible differences in the local rock strata, unbeknownst to him, I was lost in my imaginary world of hope and expectation. Shortly, though, my hopes and prayers were rewarded just as we reached the first fossil site. Before I could begin making sense of the surroundings, the palaeontologist and the young lad were upturning rocks and coming up with unique finds. Closer inspections revealed extinct elephant bone pieces, fragments of elephant trunks, rhinoceros teeth and a marvellous fragment of a crocodilian jaw as big as my hand. At that moment, overwhelmed by this incredible display of fossilised treasures, I thought this was what real life fossil beds looked like.

It is frightening even to think that, in every likelihood, it is possible that every living animal whose fossil I had seen or touched here was separated from the other in time not by a day or a month but by centuries, maybe even hundreds of millennia.

It was not long before we would walk on, descending gradually to the bed of the Gambhir River. On the way down, the palaeontologist would pick up a rock, glance it over and hand it to me. Herein was my first introduction to the Kanhati rocks – the local terminology for a stratum of stones composed primarily of mudstone, with incredibly detailed fossils of plant life preserved in them. In this case, the rock scraped off the ground contained two extremely detailed leaf imprints from the Miocene era, a period over 15 million years away.

We crossed the river and entered the bed of a now-extinct freshwater reservoir, as given off by the curious formation of crystallised gypsum in the rocks at the periphery. We began examining the localised sandstone and mudstone as our hopes shot up. Here, we discovered a genuinely complex fossil assemblage – or a place where a splendid number of prehistoric mammals, avian and reptilian fossils were strewn about, gradually exposed by the elements as the surrounding rocks eroded. Here, we found another crocodile jaw fragment. This one had a replacement tooth still inside, still not having erupted before death struck the young crocodile. The rocks here also revealed a virtually perfect crocodilian scutum fossil – the fossilised remains of the bony layer (osteoderm) under the skin of a crocodile. Rib bones, knee joints, reptilian teeth, coprolite and a deer tooth were also found, indicating the immense diversity of faunal material that had once inhabited this ecosystem, possibly more than 10 million years ago.

Standing over there, at that moment, as I endeared a gusty breeze, I could not but wonder what calamity had caused the young crocodile to pass away with its replacement tooth still waiting to erupt. Nor could I resist the urge to imagine that the deer whose tooth we had found was somehow injured or slain by the crocodilian beast whose bony skin had so perfectly fossilised that we had now extracted it almost completely. At that moment, my mind would draw every analogy from the living world I saw around me. Yet, it is frightening even to think that in every likelihood, it is possible that every animal whose fossil I had seen or touched was separated from the other in time not by a day or a month but by centuries, maybe even hundreds of millennia. As these fossilised creatures had probably never known each other in life, someday, relatively soon, the universe will turn me into nothing more than a fanciful memory; maybe not even that.

In a few hours, my palaeontologist friend and I had discovered treasures from a prehistoric world where giraffes and rhinoceros had roamed and weird elephant ancestors such as stegodons and gomphotheres with up to four meters-long tusks had ruled the ecosystem. Now the mud and sandstones with embedded fossils are threatened by permanent destruction as human greed for land shrinks the precariously surviving wilderness – the only place left where these fossils are still to be found. But in that moment, I was glad, as some of these prehistoric creatures, or their fossilised remnants, whatever you may like to believe, had found a new and secure home in peace and away from the fear of total oblivion.

The writer is an environmentalist by qualification from the University of Melbourne, presently working in the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He may be contacted at sindsparrow@gmail.com