Sankar Chatterjee

Lubbock (Texas), Nov. 16: Dinosaur fossils or Triassic rocks as a subject of any mirthful after-dinner conversation is difficult to imagine. But an evening with Sankar Chatterjee, the Calcutta-born palaeontologist who is now the toast of geoscientists worldwide, and his gracious wife Sibani can produce peals of laughter as they talk about their scientific adventures in Texas.

Shortly after Chatterjee joined Texas Tech University here as curator of palaeontology 30 years ago, he heard about the possibility that ranches around the town of Post, near Lubbock, may be the key to unlocking mysteries about some animal species that became extinct millions of years ago.

But the problem was that these typical Texan ranches were private property: in Texas, the right to property is so sacrosanct that the law allows intruders and trespassers on private land to be shot at if they violate the rights of ranchers.

Chatterjee and a team from Texas Tech, however, convinced many ranchers around Post that they were literally sitting on patches of mankind’s lost treasures and eventually the property owners allowed the team to dig for dinosaur fossils and Triassic rocks on their land.

Chatterjee compensated the ranch owners by naming some of the fossil and rock finds after these owners. But as news spread across the US about the “gold mines” in Texas for geoscientists, the ranchers became enthusiastic about Texas Tech University’s research.

One day, Chatterjee named a precious, but very small, find from a ranch after its male owner. He named another find, less valuable but much bigger in size, after another ranch owner, a woman.

In Texas, size matters, so does machismo. And so, Chatterjee found the male rancher despondent after he found out that the discovery which was bigger in size had been named after the woman who owned his neighbouring property.

On another occasion, excavation in one ranch yielded virtually nothing for Chatterjee’s team while in a neighbouring ranch, the geoscientists came up with a treasure trove. Promptly, the first rancher, whose property was useless in the geological sense, made an offer to his neighbour who had fossils underground to buy the latter's property which he could not refuse.

But it is stories about Chatterjee’s early career in Calcutta that ought to inspire India’s younger generation at a time the country is widely predicted to be on the threshold of great-power status.

He recalls that the 1960s were a time when geologists were in great demand. So wh-en Chatterjee passed with first-class-first rank in his master’s, with applied geology as his specialisation, from Jadavpur University in 1964, the world was his oyster.

But life changed for the geoscientist, then 21, after he met a British paleontologist, Pamela Robinson, at Calcutta’s Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), which celebrated its platinum jubilee recently. Robinson told Chatterjee that newly Independent India's bright sons had a duty to nourish and nurture great institutions like this institute, instead of seeking high-paid jobs in the corporate sector or with multinational companies abroad, aiding India’s brain drain.

Chatterjee was undecided, but only briefly. Robinson sw-eetened her offer of a job in ISI’s geology department by taking the young, impressionable youth to a lunch at the institute, which was being hosted by Professor Prasanta Ch-a-ndra Mahalanobis, who founded the institution in 1931.

“I was swept off my feet at that lunch,” recalls Chatterj-ee. “C.R. Rao, the founder of the Indian Econometric Society and the Indian Society for Medical Statistics, was there. Those were the days when Nobel laureates used to visit professor Mahalanobis. I immediately made up my mind to accept Pamela Robsinson’s offer”

Chinese Prime Minister Zh-ou-en-Lai said of the ISI, wh-ich he visited on December 9, 1956: “We are willing to ma-ke the study in this institute as a beginning of our learning from the wisdom of India.”

Ho Chi Minh, the legendary Vietnamese leader, visited Mahalanobis on February 13, 1958, and said: “I see that we have to learn much from you.”

In the course of a year’s work with Robinson in the Godavari basin, Chatterjee says “we found the world’s first full skeletons of the short-legged, beaked rhynchosaurs.” He has not looked back since.

Work on fossil remains kindled Chatterjee's interest in how birds evolved from dinosaurs and his research produced evidence that feathered dinosaurs used two sets of wi--gs, like the biplanes of our ti-me. It also became his obsessi-on to find the last dinosaur in India, which Chatterjee eve-ntually did, trapped as skeletal remains between lava floors in Jabalpur.

In 1975, his research came to the attention of the University of California in Berkeley, which invited Chatterjee to be a visiting professor. A year later, he accepted an assistant professor's job at George Was-hington University, then to Smithsonian Institution and eventually here in Lubbock as The Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Geoscien-ces and curator of palaeontology at Texas Tech University.