Calcutta Notebook
S R

In the late 1950’s, sleuths in Bhowanipur-Kalighat area of south Kolkata used to keep round-the-clock vigil on some dedicated activists of undivided Communist Party of India. One of them who was at times the cause of nightmare to those crack CID staff in white robe was Tapan Kumar Roy Chowdhury aka Paltuda. But they did not really know that they were shadowing a vertebrate palaeontologist who was soon to emboss his name perpetually in the comity of internationally recognized fossil-diggers. Small wonder Ann Brimacombe in her Charming the Bones: A Portrait of Margaret Matthew Colbert, wife of legendary palaeontologist, Edwin Harriss 'Ned' Colbert and curator of American Natural History Museum, would mention TRC, Sohan Lal Jain and Bimalendu Roychowdhury who did pace-setting field-research in collecting Lystrosaurus and other Gondwana fossils in Damodar River Valley and later into vast-stretches of Pranhita-Godavari region under the Geological Studies Unit, Indian Statistical Institute. Margaret had a genetic link in palaeontology as her father William Diller Mathew was an eminent paleontologist.

However, they worked more extensively under the guidance of another famous British palaeontologist Pamela Lamplugh Robinson under whom TRC did his Ph.D. dissertation at the University College of London.

Breakthrough came in 1961 when the GSU-ISI team dug out a rich bone bed, yielding bones of several specimens of dinosaurs—a new large, long-necked plant-eater dinosaur bones near the confluence of River Pranhita and the River Godavari or what is known as the Kota Formation, where the team first found dinosaur bones. The fossils were under the layers of limestone and a "fossilized" lake of about 200 million year-old was cracked in their search. It is well-known as Barapasaurus tagorei (Barapa means large leg and the name was the outcome of one of the driver's excitement and suggestion). The suffix Tagorei synchronised with the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in 1961. Tagore, it is well-known, was instrumental in the cultural-intellectual build-up of the mindset of Prashanta Chandra Mahalanobis, founder of the now-renowned Indian School of Statisticians and the ISI. It is well-known that those giant herbivores used to roam in what was known as the Gondwanaland comprising South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and southern India. The grand separation into three different continents happened later. "The Gondwana formations of India, comprising a thick succession of Permo-Mesozoic continental sedimentary rocks, occur in rift basins formed within the Indian plate. Successions developed in some of the Gondwana basins namely—Pranhita-Godavari, Damodar, Satpura and Son-Mahanadi, contain an array of vertebrate fossil assemblages. Among the four basins, the Pranhita-Godavari basin contains vertebrate assemblages from Late Permian, Middle and Late Triassic and Early Jurassic sediments. An Early Triassic assemblage is known to occur in the Damodar basin. The Satpura basin has yielded a Middle Triassic assemblage while a Late Triassic assemblage is known from the Son-Mahanadi basin. All these assemblages are confined mainly to the fluvial red bed successions. " (Taphonomy of some Gondwana vertebrate assemblages of India by Saswati Bandyopadhyay, Tapan K Roy Chowdhury, Dhurjati P Sengupta. (Taphonomy, in a nutshell, is a study of the processes of as burial, decay, and preservation that affect animal and plant remains as they become fossilized).

The discovery of Barapasaurus tagorei, a natural demo of which stands erect at the GSU-ISI museum, was among the most major strikes in the arena of paleontology after Colbert-led team had cracked in 1947. Colbert's field studies unearthed more than a dozen complete skeletons of coelophysis, a primitive dinosaur at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

Last, but not the least, TRC was not granted visa by the US government even though he was accorded Fulbright scholarship because of his association with the CPI (a card-holding member for over four decades) but rule book had to be altered to let him work at the UC of London, thanks to the strong pressure from Professor Robinson. Frankly speaking, Paltuda was among those who inspired this writer to join the CPI, though other mentors were Narahari Kaviraj, Ranadhir Dasgupta, and the first among the Chittagong Armoury Raid revolutionaries to have joined the CPI in the 1940s, Satyendra Narayan Majumdar and Nirmalya Bagchi. TRC leaves behind his widow, Ritabari, a Statistician ( among the first batches of M Stat from ISI) and two sons, Surya, an engineer with the IOC and Subho, a graduate from Kala Bhavana, Viswa Bharati University, with the SRFTI in Kolkata.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 49, June 16 -22, 2013

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