A bustard

New Delhi, May 9: Bone fragments discovered in a coal mine near Surat, Gujarat, are the earliest bird fossils from India, scientists announced today, describing a hitherto unknown species that resembled bustards and lived 52 million years ago.

Scientists from India, Belgium and Germany who studied the fossils found in the Vastan Lignite Mine near Surat said they suggest a bird that was capable of flight and may have looked like a small bustard — the size of a chicken.

Geological studies suggest the fossils are 52 million years old — from an era that scientists call the Eocene when India was an island gradually drifting towards the Asian continent.

The fossils push back the antiquity of birds in India by tens of millions of years. Until now, the oldest bird fossils from the Indian subcontinent came from an ostrich-like creature that lived in northern India about eight million years ago.

“We didn’t know anything about birds from India from this far back in time,” Gerald Mayr, a team member and head of ornithology at the Senekenburg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, told The Telegraph.

The fossils from Vastan are not enough to help scientists put together a detailed sketch of what the ancient bird may have looked like, but they do not resemble those of any other Eocene bird known so far from Europe or North America. “This suggests that India had a distinct group of birds during that period,” said Mayr.

The researchers have reported their findings in the journal Current Science, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.

A group of palaeontologists from Punjab University in Chandigarh discovered the fossils about three years ago while they were excavating the Vastan mine. The site has proved to be rich in fossils of ancient bats, mammal fossils, and even insects trapped in amber.

The scientists have named the bird Vastanavis Eocaena —indicating the site of the discovery and the period during which the bird lived.