Backstory: When I found a marine fossil in the Himalayas

I could not believe that I was holding something that was probably a hundred million years old. I had in my hand an ammonite, a fossilised hard-shelled creature.

I was on a reporting trip in Uttarakhand, with my colleague Kritika. We were documenting how road widening work under the Chardham project had led to an increased number of landslides in the Garwhal Himalaya.

Just short of the temple of Badrinath, one of the four shrines part of the Chardham pilgrimage, among the stalls selling prashad, we spotted a vendor with a small basket full of ammonites. I gasped in excitement. Mistaking my enthusiasm for the fossil with devoutness, the vendor promptly told us, “It’s a shaligram, an avatar of Vishnu.”

He started to explain the folklore behind it, but my mind had already drifted. Ammonites were marine creatures, the closest relative to them are our modern-day squids. So what were these fossils doing 11,000 feet above the sea, in the Himalayas?

“I got these from Nepal’s Gandak river,” the vendor told us.

That’s when facts I had gleaned over the years from lectures on fossils, YouTube videos, and Pranay Lal’s book Indica started to knit themselves together in my mind.

Indeed, a sea used to exist here.

Before the Himalayan range emerged, the Tethys ocean sprawled from what is today’s Gibraltar in the west to Indonesia in the east.

Ammonites lived in these waters, some feeding on drifting organic matter, others hunting smaller organisms for food. The fossils in the vendor’s basket were small enough to easily fit in my palm, but their ancestors could grow as large as a truck tyre.

Ammonites flourished until about 65 million years ago, when a sudden change in climate killed the planktons and other small oceanic creatures which they fed on. They disappeared from earth around the same time as the dinosaurs.

Centuries later, India’s landmass collided with the Eurasian plate. With this, the Tethys ocean slowly started to break into a string of salty lakes, which ultimately dried up.

As the plates continued to push against each other, they caused the land to rise and take the shape of mountains. The Himalayas, so formed, contain in them sediments from the Tethys ocean – including the fossils of ammonites.

This explains why Nepal’s Gandak river abounds with these fossils.

If you, like me, find it hard to grasp time on this scale, there is an easier way to do this. Think about Earth’s history as a single day of 24 hours. The first sign of life emerged at 4 am. Hard-shelled creatures like ammonites arrived at 9:30 pm – and vanished around 11 pm. The Himalaya started to rise at 11:45 pm. We, humans, showed up just four seconds before midnight, which is when the earth became as we know it today.

We may have been around only for a short while but we are having an outsized impact on the planet – and part of my job is documenting these changes in India.

On this trip, Kritika and I were reporting on how unscientific cutting of the mountains was triggering massive landslides, with home after home developing cracks because of land subsidence. Local residents also complained of changing weather patterns – not enough snowfall in the winter, too much rain in the monsoon – making agriculture unsustainable.

Naturally, it is not just people who are bearing the brunt of human-induced climate change – all of Himalayan flora and fauna is affected, including the fossils. With increasing glacier melt and gravel mining, the Gandak river is changing its course and it is becoming harder to find the fossils.

We might lose ammonites to climate change once again.

For now, the fossil I picked up at Badrinath lies safely at my home in the company of other souvenirs from field reporting – salt crystals from Gujarat’s Kutch, pine cones from Himachal Pradesh, and shells from Nicobar, each a reminder of how rapidly landscapes are changing on a warming earth.

All photographs by Vaishnavi Rathore.