Johannes G.M. Thewissen - The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years

Punjab, Pakistan, January 1991. I am excited beyond belief! The National Geographic Society is giving me money to collect fossils in Pakistan: my very own field project, the first time ever. For years, it has been great to collect fossils in exotic placesWyoming, Sardinia, and Colombia. But this is different. Now I can run my own program, decide where to collect, and study what is found. Its exciting but also daunting. My friend Andres Aslan will come with me. Were perfect complements: he loves geology and I love fossils. Were both just out of school, freshly minted PhDs, and together were ready and able to set the world on fire, or at least vacuum up any fossil between Attock and Islamabad.

It is Andress first trip to Pakistan. I first went there as a paleontology student in 1985, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the CIA channeled much of its support against the Soviets through Pakistan. Trucks full of equipment would travel the highway, the Grand Trunk Road, from Islamabad to the Afghan border at nightthe very same road we took to our field area. The Soviet-backed Afghan government retaliated by trying to disturb the stability of Pakistan. Car bombs were the weapon of choice, and my hotel room in Islamabad offered an excellent view into the courtyard of the police station next door, where a line of charred, exploded mini-busses were evidence of their success. With mirrors tied to long poles, the police stopped every vehicle entering the city and checked the underside for bombs. This didnt bother me, as long as I could collect fossils, studying life from a very exciting period in earths history, fifty million years ago.

FIGURE 1. Map of northern Pakistan and India, with places mentioned in this book. Fossil localities are indicated by bones (see also figure 22).

Now, six years later, Andres and I arrive in Pakistan just before the New Year and receive our permits to work in the Kala Chitta Hills, west toward the Afghan border (figure 1). The television in our Islamabad hotel is showing CNN stories about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait last year, but that conflict seems distant. I am here to immerse us in the greatest excitement paleontology has to offer: collecting fossils, being the first to see and figure out each one I pick up.

We check in at a hotel in the town of Attock, and fieldwork starts on January 1. We travel to remote sites that I chose from decades-old reports from other paleontologists. The rocks here in the shadows of the Himalayas have their own distinctive charms. They are gnarled, bent, twisted, and overturned, all the result of the mountain-building to the north. They are silent witnesses to the incredibly violent forces that raised the Himalayas to be the worlds highest mountains. With a sense of poetry, my Pakistani colleague, Mr. Arif, calls the limestone that has been tossed into tight bends the dancing limestone.

We search the dry scrublands every day, but fossils are rare; things take time. In my fieldbook I have logged fifty-one fossils. None seem excitingsmall pieces of fishbone, crocodile armor, fish teeth, and a piece of the casing of the ear of a whale, the tympanic bone. It is not the first whale bone I ever found. Growing up, in Holland, I lived close to a fossil locality where my father used to take me. A river had dropped rocks there that it collected as it cut through mountains upstream, in Belgium, France, and beyond. There was everything from sea lilies hundreds of millions of years old, to plant fossils from coal swamps, and large fossil whale bones from when that area was covered by ocean, just a few million years ago. It cemented my interest in fossils, and for my twelfth birthday I got a rock hammer, which is still the hammer I use now.

I have never studied whales before, and now too, whale bones are no good for me. The money from the National Geographic Society is for studying how land mammals migrated between Indo-Pakistan and Asia across the Tethys Sea some fifty million years ago. Whales are of no use for studying migrations on land. I need land-dwelling mammals, and many more fossils, if this grant is to be successful. I am very aware that failing to deliver on a first grant can sink a career.

On day five the dream collapses. The United States is threatening to invade Kuwait, and the U.S. government is worried about the safety of its citizens. Mr. Arif is told by his superiors at the Geological Survey of Pakistan to escort us back to Islamabad, the capital. All my plans are crumbling before my eyes. The reason for going back to Islamabad seems ridiculousthe conflict is in the Gulf, not Pakistan. The physical dangers seem much smaller than when I first visited. Why should politics end the field season?