The Hindu : National : A Jurassic Park of sorts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 22, 2006

National

National

A Jurassic Park of sorts

T. Lalith Singh

HYDERABAD: "It's as if an old boy's club is being formed here," he laughs.

If B.M. Birla Science Centre Director B.G. Siddharth is amused, he has every reason to be. For these days, he is engaged in the exercise of bringing together a fish, tree trunk, some leaves and of course, a dinosaur. All hailing from the same location and frozen in a time warp dating back to the early Jurassic Age, some 160 million years ago.

The Science Centre, which mounted a dinosaur skeleton five years ago on its premises, has now received a fresh batch of frozen consignment from the Geological Survey of India (GSI). "They gave us the fossil of a small fish along with a tree trunk and some leaves that were found to be 160 million year old. These were found during the GSI excavation at Yamanapally in Adilabad from where dinosaur fossil too was recovered," says Dr. Siddharth.

The exercise to have the newly acquired flora and fauna from the early Jurassic Age along with the 44-metre-long, 4.87-metre-high dinosaur mounted at the Dinosaurium has begun. The fish fossil measures 0.12 metre while the tree trunk stands about 1.21 metre by 0.91 metre.

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