The Ghughua Fossil Park lies near Shahpura in the Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, 14 km from Shahpura and 76 km from Jabalpur off National Highway 11, spread over 27.34 hectares in the villages of Ghughua and Umaria. It is a national park made of stone plants: fossil leaves, fruits, seeds, wood and shells, some of them about 65 million years old, from 31 genera in 18 families identified so far. Palms are the most prominent.
The fossils were recognised in the 1970s by Dr Dharmendra Prasad, a statistical officer of Mandla district and honorary secretary of the district archaeology unit. Dr S. R. Ingle of Science College, Jabalpur, and Dr M. B. Bande of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in Lucknow went on to study them systematically, and the state government notified the area as a national park in 1983. A fossil wood found here, bearing some likeness to eucalyptus, may be the oldest of its type ever discovered, and it would support the idea that such trees were spread across Gondwana, the old southern landmass that joined peninsular India to Africa, Madagascar and Australia. A dinosaur egg has turned up too.
The ground records a different climate. Scientists who have studied Ghughua describe a humid, equatorial place in ancient times, with even temperatures all year and more than 2,000 mm of rain, against about 1,400 mm now. Mollusc fossils point to a large body of water, and some scientists have speculated that a branch of the ancient Tethys Sea reached this far. Jaswant Singh Guleria of the Birbal Sahni Institute sets it in a longer story: late in the Lower Cretaceous, the pteridophytes and gymnosperms that had dominated for ages began to give way to flowering plants, and most plants reached their modern forms in the period these fossils record. Many of the extinct plants here look remarkably like trees still growing in India, among them jackfruit, rudraksh, jamun and amla.
The park has a museum, where the dinosaur egg is what holds the children's attention, and a concrete road runs through the grounds with fossils of every shape and size set out on both sides. Most of its visitors are palaeobotany students, scientists and archaeologists.
Petrified palms, leaves, fruit and seeds · Late Cretaceous to Paleogene, ~65 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
India
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