DIRT TALK - Martin Gibling
Martin Gibling
Emeritus Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Dalhousie University
Title: Fossils in the Himalaya, How Scottish soldiers with the East India Company found Jurassic ammonites
Abstract: Ammonites had long been venerated on the Indian plains as Shaligrams, living embodiments of Vishnu, but the origin of the fossils was unknown to Europeans. In 1821, a suite of ammonites and belemnites from the NW Himalaya reached the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata. The fossils had been sent by James Gerard, a surgeon with the East India Company, who had accompanied his brother Alexander on a military surve. The region had been ceded to the company in 1816 after the Anglo-Nepalese War, allowing British soldiers and administrators access to the mountains for the first time. Chinese border guards at the Tibetan frontier turned back the survey party after a courteous exchange of gifts.
The brothers were educated men from Aberdeen, where their father and grandfather were noted scholars in the Scottish Enlightenment. They may have learned geology from William Lonsdale, curator for the Geological Society in London, who had studied the Jurassic rocks of Bath and taught East India men about the geology of India, at a time when the new science of geology was of great public interest.
The brothers’ reports indicate that the fossils were collected from 16,200 feet in the Spiti Valley on the northern side of the Himalaya. By 1831, James Gerard was aware that the fossils had been raised tectonically along with the mountain chain and were not indicative of a Great Flood that had covered the mountains. But it was not until 1833 that the specimens were formally studied and dated as Jurassic by Rev. Robert Everest (brother of George Everest after whom the mountain was named). Everest attempted to match the fossils with those in temples in Kolkata, but without success.
In 1863, Henry Blanford dated Gerard’s fossils as Upper Jurassic (Kimmeridgian) and identified a new species: Ammonites gerardi. The fossils belong to the Spiti Shale, an extensive deep-shelf deposit of the Tethys Ocean. The formation yields natural gas that burns as a holy flame at the temple of Muktinath in Nepal, from where true Shaligrams are considered to originate.
Bio: Martin Gibling has research interests in rivers and their sediments through geological time. Recent research themes include how the evolution of terrestrial vegetation changed the world’s rivers, and the human impact on rivers during the Anthropocene.
Time
Location
In-person: Milligan Room, 8007 LSC