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ASHIS CHAKRABARTI
CALCUTTA, Oct 4: Geologist Pradip K Bose's work may rewrite the history of life on earth as we know it. But his telephone is not ringing off the hook, neither are congratulations flooding in.
Not that it matters to Bose, who appears to be rooted to terra firma, three days after news of his stunning discovery of evidence in a Churhat sandstone, that animal life may have existed 1.1 billion years ago, appeared in cience, the prestigious United States magazine (its India correspondent reported it in The Indian Express on October 1).
So far, fossil findings in China had fixed the age at 600 million years but with Bose's discovery, scientists may have to take a fresh look at Darwin's Theory of Evolution. ``To keep the mosquitoes away,'' says Bose humbly, seated in his South Calcutta home, ``I have to keep the windows closed. But after a while, it gets too hot, please don't mind.''
Bose seems to be far, far away from the frenetic technological advancements of the day. Cybercafes may be sprouting in five-starhotels, but Bose still has no access to the Internet -- the main reason why, he says, he is yet to get details of the Chinese fossils.
Jadavpur University, where he heads the Geology Department, and where he travels to by bus every day, has told him they will get an Internet connection -- in six months. He has no computer at home, the university is closed for the vacation and so he cannot receive comments that may have come his way after the Science piece. But he is not complaining.
``I'm not exceptionally meritorious,'' is one of the first things he says. ``I have no pedigree, no mentor. And you know how much pedigree and mentors matter for scientists in our country.''
Perhaps that is also why news agency reports from Washington on the discovery mentioned Bose's German collaborators, paleobiologist Adolf Seilacher and sedimentologist Fredrich Pfluger, ignoring the fact that they came into the picture long after Bose's Jadavpur University team had made the discovery in Churhat.
Son of a governmentclerk, educated at a little-known Howrah institution and later at Jadavpur University, Bose has never been trained abroad. His project was partly paid for by the Department of Science and Technology and when the funds dried up, his fellow Calcutta scientists and he dipped into their personal savings to help sustain their work.
``Some contributed Rs 3,000 and he, being the senior member, had to pay a little more,'' says his wife Sreeradha, who has a doctorate in Physics. Bose is, however, grateful to former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Arjun Singh. For the PWD guest house at Churhat made things easier when the Germans joined his team. The story of the Churhat discovery dates back seven years when Bose, along with Jadavpur colleague Subir Sarkar, started working on trace fossils there.
In 1995, Bose, Sarkar and another colleague, Santanu Banerjee, published a paper in the German geological journal, Nus Jaber Palaont, citing several examples of trace fossils. One of the examples happened to be coelomatematazoan, organisms with body fluids, from Churhat.
Seilacher, who edits the journal, was struck by the Churhat example. One of the world's most distinguished experts in the field -- he won the Nobel-equivalent in Geology, the Crafoord Award from the Swedish Academy of Sciences-Seilacher -- and his colleague at Yale University, Pfluger, joined the Calcutta scientists at Churhat in early 1996.
``But at that stage we could not decide if this organism was that old; the Germans helped us with their dating techniques which conclusively proved the case,'' says Bose.
Although microbiologists had predicted that coelomate metazoans existed at least one billion years ago, the Churhat find, Bose says, is the ``first hard evidence.'' It could lead, he adds, to the Darwinian theory of evolution being reinterpreted. For, the existence of multicelled animals so ancient suggests that ``even such insignificant life forms could survive for so long.''
Bose is leaving for Maihar tomorrow to study the history ofsedimentation and life during the Vindyan period.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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