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Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Greg Wilson heads to India to search for dinosaur-age fossils.
Today was our third day in the field. We've been working at a locality near the village of Naskal, about 68 kilometers from Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. It's where the first mammal fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs in India were found. Besides me, the field team consists of my GSI colleague (Mr. Anantharaman), our driver (Tirupathi), and four workers that we hired from the village of Naskal (Enkaya, Malaya, Jangaya, Chendraya). Not sure if everyone in the village ends their name in "aya" but it seems that way. The famous Naskal site hadn't been touched in over six years so the first day we had to do a lot of digging to get down to the fossil layer. It took most of the day.
 Yesterday we began the process of collecting sediment from the fossil layer, finding little bits of bone and shell along the way. That night I ended up staying in a lodge in Pargi, a small village of 30,000. Sounds like a lot of people but there were few conveniences there, which means there wasn't an Internet cafe. Today was another long day of clearing away more dirt so that we could collect more sediment from the fossil layer. Mr. Anantharaman took two of the workers (Malaya and Jangaya) to a stream where they began the process of sieving the sediment in wooden boxes with mesh-screened bottoms. I worked with Enkaya and Chendraya. They don't speak English, only a little Hindi and the local language Tellagu. I don't speak either of those two Indian languages except the numbers and "go" which is "chello." Oh yeah, I've also learned the word for "mouse" (alluka) so that I can roughly describe the mammal fossils that we're looking for. We end up communicating through mime and drawing, which I'm sure probably looks pretty hilarious if anyone else was around to view it. So tonight I'm staying in the town of Vikarabad; it's about 10 miles away from our site and worlds apart from Pargi considering I'm typing away in this Internet cafe with the sounds of The Backstreet Boys blaring ("I want it that way").
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