In 2000, while visiting the Central Museum of Nagpur in Western India, the paleontologist Jeffrey A Wilson found himself hunched over one of the most fascinating fossils he had ever set eyes on. One of his colleagues had excavated the specimen in 1984, in the village of Dholi Dungri in Gujarat, on the western coast of India.

“It was the first time that the bones of a baby dinosaur and its eggs were found together in the same specimen,” says Wilson, an associate professor of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan, US. But to his amazement, there was something more. “In this specimen, the bones that I was examining had two little vertebrae with a special connection – something only snakes had,” he says.

To make sure he didn’t misinterpret it, Wilson looked for the same pattern along the spinal cord. And sure enough, he found it. “It was like a light bulb had gone off in my head. Could there be a pre-historic snake in this fossil as well?”

There wasn’t a facility in India that could do the deep cleaning the fossil required. It took Wilson four years to get approval from Geological Survey of India (GSI), a government-run body that oversees geological surveys across the country, to transport the specimen to the US. When the time came, he packed it all into a box, and put it in a backpack which he carried with him back to the United States, he says. Once there, it took an entire year of cleaning to remove the rocky matrix around its soft and delicate bones.

In the years that followed, scientists, paleontologists and snake experts pored over the fossil.

In 2013, with Indian paleontologist Dhananjay Mohabey and others from GSI, Wilson co-authored a paper describing the incredibly action-packed moment that the fossil captured. They not only confirmed the presence of a prehistoric snake, but also found that its jaws were opened wide as if to eat the baby dinosaur – one that had just hatched. The hatchling was beside a clutch of dinosaur eggs, which were still whole. The geologist studying the project deduced that the animals had probably been buried in a mudslide – an event that began quickly, without warning, locking away that predatory moment in time.

Hundreds of fossilised dinosaur nests have been found in India (Credit: Alamy)

And that’s how Sanajeh indicus made its global debut – the words are Sanskrit for “ancient gape from the Indus”. Scientists noted how pre-historic snakes didn’t have the ability to open their jaws wide enough to swallow big prey, an ability that some modern snakes have acquired through the process of evolution.

In 2013, a similar specimen was discovered in the same spot and the team is now preparing another paper that describes how the anatomy of Sanajeh indicus closely resembles that of modern lizards.

In this way, fossils can unravel secrets of an ancient past that we wouldn’t be privy to otherwise, but despite the groundbreaking findings that have informed science in recent years, there just isn’t enough funding or systematic study of India’s immense fossil wealth, paleontologists say.

“I think India’s fossil heritage is largely untapped and has been forgotten,” says Advait M Jukar, a vertebrate paleontologist at Yale University and research associate in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. “India has produced the earliest whales, some of the largest rhinos and elephants that have ever existed, vast beds of dinosaur eggs, and strange horned reptiles from before the age of dinosaurs. But there are so many gaps that still need to be filled.”

And that’s because large parts of India have not been systematically explored by professional paleontologists.

Evolutionary puzzles

In spite of this, over the years, major paleontological finds from India have helped scientists piece together critical information to debunk old theories and shed new light on how life has evolved over time.

At the heart of many of these discoveries is Ashok Sahni, a pioneering paleontologist whose grandfather, father and uncle were all in the field. Sahni often uses his own funds to power his expeditions – his personal collection of fossils has filled the shelves of Punjab University’s Natural History Museum.

In 1982, at a dinosaur site in the blazing heat of the central Indian city of Jabalpur, Sahni remembers covering every inch of ground in search of fossils. When he bent over to tie his shoelaces, right there in front of him were four or five spherical structures, measuring 16-20cm in length. “These were very weathered, round, roughly of equal shape. I was stunned. Could they be dinosaur eggs?”

Titanosaurus indicus was discovered after gigantic vertebrae were discovered in the city of Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, in 1828 (Credit: Alamy)

Indeed, they were the eggs of the Titanosaurus indicus, a large herbivorous dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period. It was the first time a clutch of dinosaur eggs had been discovered in India. Today, nearly 40 years later, nesting sites of dinosaurs have been found all over the country.

In August 2003, Sahni shot to global fame after 20 years of excavating, identifying and piecing together the bones of India’s newest species of carnivorous dinosaur, Rajasaurus narmadensis, which is thought to have been 30ft (9.14m) long.

But it’s Sahni’s less glamorous, lesser-known discoveries that have really informed science.

In 2010, he was part of a team of Indian, German and US scientists who discovered perfectly preserved insects in amber, estimated to be more than 54 million years old. The discovery came from a lignite mine 30km (18.6 miles) northeast of Surat in Gujarat, and it indicated that today the region could be home to some of the oldest deciduous forests in the world. “The published findings challenged the notion that India was ever an isolated continent,” Sahni says.

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