Age is just a very large number !
- chet kamat
- Aug 31, 2021
- 1 min read
Updated: Feb 13
Every time I drive past Nandi Hills, I'm overwhelmed by the scale, solidity and seeming timelessness of these boulder strewn hills.
Since we bought the site, I have also been curious whether I'd find some fossils embedded in the rocks and boulders here. Of course I neither saw nor heard of any fossil finds at Nandi Hills and I wondered why. I decided to do a bit of research to learn more about this.
We learnt in school that the Earth was formed about 4.5 billon years ago. I discovered that the Nandi Hills are part of the Dharwar Craton. This is a piece of the earth's crust that was formed in the Archean Eon. An eon is simply a large measure of time, similar to minutes and seconds. This puts the creation of the Nandi Hills somewhere between 2.5 to 4 billon years ago ! The only living creatures at that time were possibly some single celled organisms like microbes and bacteria. This explains why we never see fossils in the rocks of the Dharwar Craton.
India does have fossils in other regions, the most exciting find being at Wadadham Fossil Park, close to Gadchiroli, near Maharashtra’s border with Andhra Pradesh. These fossils are from relatively recent times 😉, i.e the Jurassic period, about 150 to 200 million years ago.
When one thinks of the boulders on our site in Hampi from the perspective of time, one realises that they have been around for so much longer before us and will stay around long after we are forgotten.
I never thought of the fossils embedded in the stones & boulders. Interestingly, there are stunning stones in Karjat with glass and crystal-like material attached to it. Will try and understand how old that part of the world is! Thanks for sharing