Vishal Verma, 52, remembers the day he first held a dinosaur egg in his hands. It was the winter of 2006, and Verma was in the process of guiding a PhD scholar around fossil sites on the banks of the river Narmada, something he had done several times before. Earlier that year, Verma had helped the Madhya Pradesh government set up the Archaeological Museum in Mandu to store fossilised discoveries from the river basin. In his mind, therefore, it was to be one of his last excavations. “I had thought now that a government museum has come up, there was little relevance for my work. I was basically handing over my duties to this scholar with a mind to retire,” Verma said.
Then, during that dig, he found a set of 25 soropaud dinosaureggs, which over the next three months grew to a 100. Then 36 years old, Verma remembers that his ecstatic mind wandered to Phantom, Lee Falk’s iconic comic strip, centered around a costumed crusader fighting crime in the fictional land of Bangalla. “In the Phantom comics, there was a character called Stegy, who was a Stegosaurus dinosaur. When I held that first dinosaur egg that I excavated, I felt like I was the Phantom,” Verma said.
Sixteen years have passed since then, and in that time, Verma has built for himself a unique identity. He is a physics teacher to Class 11 and 12 students from the Higher Secondary Boys School in Bakaner. But he is also Narmada’s “Dinosaur Man” — who spends his time finding, excavating, and preserving dinosaur fossils, raising awareness and piquing scientific interest in the process.
“Even today, with every egg that I find, I feel the same excitement I felt in 2006,” Verma said.
Born in Itarsi in 1970, Verma’s father worked as a clerk with the Madhya Pradesh irrigation department. What that meant was that a young Verma moved often, but nearly always in areas along the banks of the Narmada, the 1,312km-long river that originates in Amarkantak and pours into the Gulf of Cambay with 1,077km of its journey within the geographical confines of Madhya Pradesh.
One of Verma’s first passions as a child was art, and when he was in Class 12 at a school in Manawar, his father’s colleague showed him something that piqued a lifelong interest. “He showed me a fossilised cidaris, which is an extinct relative of the starfish. It looked so beautiful,” Verma said.
By 1990, Verma had begun collecting fossilised such as snails or cidaris, and often organised exhibitions for neighbours, students, and community gatherings. “Over the years, many tribal communities along the river have also joined me in the preservation of dinosaur nesting sites,” Verma said.
By the turn of the century, Verma began to work with the Madhya Pradesh government on preserve nesting sites, and fighting against the illegal smuggling of fossils.
Sameeta Rajora, CEO of the MP ecotourism development board, said that she first heard about Verma’s work when she was deputed as the divisional forest officer of the region a decade ago. “My husband and I had attended a few of his exhibitions and were very impressed by his findings. The credit for recognising this region for its rich fossil presence goes to him. It was later that the forest department got involved with him and we have been able to protect some of the sites,” Rajora said.
She added that the department now uses him as a full-time consultant, drawing on his relationships with locals. “We reach out to a large population to create awareness with his help.”
Ironically, the recognition of the Narmada river banks as an area rich in fossils, particularly dinosaur eggs, has brought with it several dangers. Senior officials from the Madhya Pradesh forest department said that fossils are often smuggled in trucks late in the night, and used to create pottery, furniture, ornaments, and decorative items.“Recently, we confiscated a truck full of fossilised items. There are many areas that are still undiscovered but people start excavating potential sites for non-academic purposes and there is no count of how much material is illegally picked up from there,” said a forest official who asked not to be named.
Though Verma was working in relative anonymity until then, the 2006 discovery of the 100 fossilised Cretaceous period eggs (aged at least 65 million years) in Dhar district, with two other amateur explorers Rajesh Chouhan and Govind Verma, catapulted him to national attention. Since then, with interest growing, he has discovered over 100,000 fossils of hemiaster (an echinoid known as heart urchins), 40,000 shark teeth, and around 500 dinosaur eggs, most donated to different government museums in Madhya Pradesh.
Verma was also part of the 2018 discovery of a hatchery of 256 eggs and 92 nests of Titanosaurs — the largest dinosaurs to have ever lived — in three sites in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat led by Harsha Dhiman, of the Delhi University’s geology department. Scientists say that these sites are believed to be at least 67 million years old, and are among the largest such sites in the world. Guntupalli VR Prasad, professor of geology at DU, said, “Before this, we knew that multi-shelled or pathologic eggs were laid only by birds, but for the first time we saw such eggs of dinosaurs. This is a major discovery and these sites are helping us uncover the history of dinosaurs in India,” Prasad said. The multi-shelled Pathologic eggs are formed when an egg tends to return to the ovum, usually because of a stressful environment like a volcanic eruption or a flood, with layers of calcified shells formed one over the other.
Verma says all these discoveries are “important pieces of history”.
“A lot of the eggs that we have found in recent years are believed to be from the time when dinosaurs in India were likely on the verge of extinction. Experts have traced the history of these eggs to the Maastrichtian Stage,” he said.
In the works is a “museum of fertility”, where Verma intends to trace the history of dinosaurs in India and establish how they evolved. “The museum will showcase how nature has the power to nourish but also has the power to destroy. Otherwise it would not have been that mighty creatures like dinosaurs could ever be extinct,” he said.
Gazing at an egg in his hands, the artist turned physics teacher turned fossil explorer says that he often returns to why he first began this process, “to preserve what is beautiful”.
“And what is more beautiful than the fertilised evidence of an animal that lived millions of years before our race even walked the Earth?”
