India's Rajasaurus has story very, very long in the telling
By Gayle Worland
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
August 13, 2003

For more than two years, the assembly of bones that could serve as a key to India's lost dinosaur world took up quarters in the basement of a University of Chicago laboratory.

Examined under stereo microscopes and on tables lined with bottles of epoxy, the hunks of spine and a brain case were painstakingly cleaned, studied, copied and re-assembled into a specimen that could hold clues to the geological evolution of the Southern Hemisphere: the first dinosaur skull ever found in India.

Rajasaurus narmadensis--stocky, powerful and bearing an unusual head crest--weighed an estimated 4 tons and measured 30 to 35 feet in length. The brutish predator belongs to the Abelisauridae family, dating from the end of the Cretaceous Period, just prior to the dinosaurs' extinction.

"This is very important to us, because although many bones are known from Cretaceous rocks in India, few are known to correspond to one animal," the University of Michigan's Jeffrey A. Wilson said last week in an e-mail interview from India. "The discovery of Rajasaurus is one of the few examples of an associated specimen that can give us a good idea of what the animal looked like--its proportions, etc.

"The story of Rajasaurus is one that mixes India's ancient northward journey, the rise of the Himalayas, extinction and evolution."

Found near the Narmada River in western India, the bones of the 67 million-year-old dinosaur traveled back to the subcontinent this week in the care of Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist and president of the Chicago-based science education program Project Exploration. Sereno is scheduled to join Wilson on Wednesday in Bombay to return the bones and present a full-scale model of the dinosaur skull during a press conference.

"These are diplomatic treasures, and it was really a diplomatic feat" to take them out of India, Sereno said before his departure. "We brought them here because we knew they needed more fine preparation.

"It's sort of like taking a mummy out of Egypt."

The significance of the bones wasn't revealed until Sereno and Wilson stumbled upon them in Jaipur during an otherwise disappointing expedition to western and central India in 2001. At the Geological Survey of India museum, the two Midwestern scientists looked over a collection of bones excavated in the 1980s, along with a highly detailed map of the dig by scientist Suresh Srivastava.

Suddenly, they realized that a hodge-podge of bones belonged to the same dinosaur. And best of all, pieces from more than 60 percent of the animal's skull remained, including the bone that encased its walnut-size brain.

That "Eureka!" moment is an important lesson for the field of paleontology, said Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at the Field Museum.

"It shows there's a lot left to be discovered in museum collections, as well as in the rock itself," said Makovicky, who will be part of a team traveling to India next spring to develop field work focused on the Triassic Period, which took place approximately 245 million to 208 million years ago.

Sereno returned to Chicago with sections of Rajasaurus' jaw, hip bone, brain case, and vertebrae from the neck, back and tail. When he and U. of C. fossil preparer Tyler Keillor reassembled the head, a fuller picture emerged.

"It's like assembling a car. You have to put the door with the hood and the roof to really understand the profile of the car," said Sereno, who depicts the process at www.projectexploration.org. "On average, when you have this much of the skull, you're not far off."

Rajasaurus belongs to a group of dinosaurs that inhabited only the southern continents, which remain largely uncharted territory for paleontologists.

"We have long lived in an age where dinosaur discoveries were dominated by North America and Asia," said Sereno. "We know Tyrannosaurus rex. It's world famous. What was on India? Tyrannosaurus was not in India. They don't have Triceratops; they don't have duckbills. It's India's lost dinosaur world."

When Pangea, Earth's single land mass, broke up during the Triassic Period, the Indian subcontinent became part of the composite continent Gondwana, along with Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia and South America.

Millions of years later, the continents of Gondwana began to rift and India drifted northward, taking with it its share of dinosaurs. India crashed into Asia to create the Himalayas 40 million to 50 million years ago, well after the end of the dinosaur age.

Scientists have unearthed other members of the Abelisaur family in Madagascar and South America. Their cousin Rajasaurus was "a robust meat-eating biped, massively built," said Makovicky. "It may be a little more primitive than some of the South American species.

"This might show that India rifted off early in the Cretaceous period and the fauna of India was isolated." Sereno hopes that he and the U.S.-India team, which also includes Ashok Sahni of Panjab University, eventually can return to the 100-foot rocky precipice where more of Rajasaurus' bones may lie within the earth. First, however, they'll want the blessings of the villagers who live nearby, particularly since a Hindu temple sits above the excavation site.

"It's been 25 years since serious work has been done there," Sereno said. "Maybe this is the point to begin again."

Copyright © 2003, The Chicago Tribune
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