100 Million-Year-Old Fossil Bones of Dinosaur Discovered in West Khasi Hills

SHILLONG: In what could be termed as a big discovery for the people of the Northeast, 100 million-year-old fossil bones of a sauropod dinosaur discovered in West Khasi Hills district, Meghalaya.

Notably, with this Meghalaya has become the first state in the entire Northeast India and also among 5 in the country with a record of such species so far.

According to reports, the GSI researchers noted that this is the first record of sauropods of probable Titanosaurian origin discovered in the region.

The bone fragments were collected from poorly sorted, purplish to greenish very coarse-grained arkosic sandstone interlaid with pebbly beds.

More than twenty-five disarticulated, mostly fragmentary bone specimens were recovered, which are of different sizes and occur as isolated specimens but some of them were found in close proximity to each other, the researchers said.

Sauropods had very long necks, long tails, small heads relative to the rest of their body, and four thick, pillar-like legs. They are notable for the enormous sizes attained by some species, and the group includes the largest animals to have ever lived on land.

"Dinosaur bones from Meghalaya were reported by GSI in 2001 but they were too fragmentary and ill-preserved to understand its taxonomic identification," said Arindam Roy, Senior Geologist, Palaeontology Division, GSI.

"The abundance of bones recovered during the present work and especially the finding of few limb bones and vertebrae having taxonomic characters of titanosauriform clade are unique," Roy said.

In India, the Late Cretaceous sauropod dinosaur generally belongs to the titanosaurian clade and has been reported from the Lameta Formation of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra and Kallamedu Formation of Tamil Nadu, the researchers said.

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