Now, after eight years of off-road duty and poor maintenance, the car is
on its last legs. Every so often, Jamil, our lanky driver, pulls off to the
side of the road, and fiddles under the hood.
“Eek minute, sir, nooh problem.”
The problem usually does go away, although in a bit more time than
Jamil’s “one minute.” Jamil’s gray shalwar kameez has many oil stains.
It flaps in the wind as he moves his body energetically as if he is in his
twenties, but the creases in his face suggest at least another decade. He
knows and loves this car, but twice we interrupt the trip to visit a
mechanic. Next to car shops are usually tea shops, and we sip the sugary
brew of boiled milk and spiced tea while Jamil argues with two skinny,
brown, bare legs that stick out from underneath our car, not leaving the
car out of his sight for even a minute.
We arrive at the village of Thatta, just south of the Kala Chitta Hills.
There, a local politician owns a walled compound that resembles a
medieval village. Roughly hewn brown-gray rocks form a wall that
embraces a hilltop, and within it, separate walls surround five or six
35
36 | Chapter 3
houses with courtyards where his extended family lives. I recognize the
rocks. They come from the mountains to the north and were formed in
the Jurassic period, when a deep sea covered this area. The walls of each
of the houses lack outward-facing windows, and there is only one small
door to the outside, creating a feudal atmosphere ready to withstand the
violent intruders of past ages. However, it is also functional in the
present: the walls ensure the privacy of the women inside their own
courtyard. They can uncover their faces here. The view over the outside
wall looks down onto the village. It is a patchwork of tiny, one-room
dwellings all built from that same rock type and all with tiny walled
courtyards. Smoke fills the valley in the mornings when all the women
bake bread in their clay ovens. There is only one paved intersection in
this village, and barely any motorized traffic, so the sounds are those of
kids playing, women banging cooking-pots, men yelling at their live-
stock, dogs barking, birds singing at dawn, and five times a day the local
mullah drowning out everybody else.
On the other side of our compound is the girls’ school, on a hill and
surrounded by a wall, but its buildings are modern, smooth and white-
washed. The wall is high, so that the girls are afforded privacy too. But
our hilltop is higher, so we can look over both walls and into their
space. I avert my eyes when I am near, and Arif approves. It shows
respect to the local culture.
The mullah wakes us around 5:30 a.m. with his call to prayer. It is
broadcast through a loudspeaker, but none in our group gets up to pray.
From most mosques, the call to prayer only lasts a few minutes, but this
mullah also delivers what sounds like a sermon through his loudspeaker.
It takes half an hour, and closes the book on going back to sleep for me.
Arif chuckles from deep inside his sleeping bag.
“What is he saying, Arif?”
“He says that we people are worse than dogs, for not going to
mosque.”
“So most people don’t pray in the morning?”
“Ahh, maybe they pray in house, maybe they do not pray. This poor
man is a little bit sleepy.”
Dogs are unclean animals in this culture, so that is quite an insult.
But Mr. Arif thinks it funny, unconcerned as he is with the mullah’s
empty mosque and his village ideas, and desiring to wake up slowly.
Life is simple. There is no heat, water, or gas, and it is very cold. I
wear my coat to sleep in my sleeping bag. Our bedroom opens onto a
veranda that opens onto the courtyard of our guesthouse. We are the
A Whale with Legs | 37
only visitors. The kitchen has a single lightbulb as its only luxury. Rook-
oon, the cook, brought a burner for cooking from the city. He fills it
with gasoline; the chappati s, the Pakistani pancake-shaped bread, taste
like fuel. We bring water in jugs from a well in the village, but it is con-
taminated, and all my companions have diarrhea. I do not, because I use
a water filter.
“Water is bad. Jamil, Rookoon, this man, all ill, what you call?” Arif
looks pained because he cannot remember the word as the four of us sit
together wearing our coats in the dark kitchen.
“Diarrhea. I am not ill—I use a filter to clean the water. Shall I show
you how to use it?”
I attach the hoses to the fist-sized filter, and pump the bad water from
a glass through the filter into my empty mineral-water bottle, also
brought from the city. Arif watches patiently, but not eagerly, as the bot-
tle slowly fills.
I pour some water in his glass. He holds it up to the light of our bulb,
swirls it as if it is fine wine, and drinks it.
“Taste is same,” he says, unconvinced.
“You may use it anytime you like, so you can drink clean water.”
Mr. Arif is silent. This is too far outside the sphere of things he knows.
He does not take me up on the offer, and the diarrhea persists.
Walking through the kitchen into the courtyard, I have to bend my
head because the door is too low. There is a bathroom in the compound
too, a hole behind a wall, but there is no sewer system. With three com-
panions with diarrhea, I stay away from it, holding my business until we
are in the hills collecting fossils.
Jamil made a deal with a stray dog. He feeds her leftover chappati s
every day. The dog, with its two puppies, now sleeps under his vehicle,
and will bark if “bad people” come. I am not sure what Jamil expects,
and I don’t ask. Most Pakistanis, just like most other people, are some-
what embarrassed when a negative part of their country or culture sur-
faces. Jamil is a kind man. I do not want to embarrass him. Of course,
with dogs being unclean, Jamil would not dream of touching the canine
family. Not that the mom would let us get close to her—she waits until
Jamil has walked away from the place where he drops the bread before
she and her pups go and retrieve it. Our other pet is a peacock, which
flies freely in and out of our courtyard. Arif lost his soap box, and he
leaves his soap bar lying open on the veranda, where the peac
ock pecks
at it. Every morning finds Arif searching for his soap, eventually locat-
ing it somewhere in the dirt, mangled by pecks and coated in sand. I do
38 | Chapter 3
not know why the peacock likes soap, or why Arif never brings his bar
inside to avoid the daily search and rescue.
Collecting fossils is easier this year. I now have a copy of a map made
by a British geologist, T. G. B. Davis, before the country turned inde-
pendent. Black lines indicate where different rock types can be found,
and dashed lines where there are faults: cracks in the surface. There are
a few topographical landmarks on the map that help to find places,
although it does not show elevation.
Our field area is in the hills north of Thatta, less than half an hour
from where we are staying. Fieldwork starts on January 2, and the next
day, as we cross a low green hill covered with fossil clams, there is a rib
fragment, as long as a finger but three times as thick. The bone is pachy-
ostotic. It is unusual for a mammal to have thick ribs like that. The bro-
ken surface reveals that the small cavities that are normally present in
bone are absent from this one: the bone is also osteosclerotic. Combining
those two features, scientists call this bone structure pachyosteoscle-
rotic.1 Although basilosaurids are somewhat pachyostotic, there is only
one group of modern marine mammals that has pachyosteosclerotic
ribs: sirenians or seacows, which includes manatees and dugongs (figure
12). They are obligate marine mammals just like cetaceans, but unrelated
to them; they became aquatic independently. The oysters have already
indicated that these are rocks formed on a seafloor, so the rib pertains to
a marine mammal, very likely a sirenian. Kind of cool to run into a
marine mammal by accident. After last year’s high with the Pakicetus
incus, my interest in whales has waned. It is important to get back to
land mammals, since that was what the grant money was for. I call Arif
over, but he is not impressed. It is just a rib. He is right. I wrap my find,
note it in my field notebook, and put it at the bottom of my backpack.
As the season continues, more fossils are found, but nothing spec-
tacular. Apparently Richard Dehm, the German professor who worked
here more than thirty years ago, picked up all the fossils that were on
the surface and put them in his museum in Munich. Erosion is not fast
here; not many new fossils have been exposed since that time. Like me,
Dehm was interested in land mammals, and focused his energy on rocks
that were formed in rivers. Geologically, we are in the foreland of the
Himalayas. This area is very complex, and was greatly deformed when
the mountains formed. Large slabs of fossil seafloor were pushed on top
of river deposits, turned and twisted, and flipped on their sides. You
always have to keep your eyes on the rocks here. A few steps and you
may be out into a completely different fossil environment and millions
A Whale with Legs | 39
of years later in time. The colors of these hills delight me. Mudstones are
mouse-gray, dull purple, or the color of venous blood. There are white
limestones in foot-thick bands that stick up higher than their surround-
ings and form ledges, so bright in the sun that it pains the eyes to look
at them. There are silts, coarser than the mudstones; they are green, with
lots of fossil clams, and show that the sea was there, fifty million years
ago. The green color comes from the mineral glauconite. It forms in the
wave zone along a coast. Its tiny crystals sparkle in the sun, as if a wan-
dering giant crossed the green silts carrying a leaking bag of sugar.
Together, these rocks are called the Kuldana Formation. They are visible
in five low and nameless valleys, which I prosaically call A through E in
my fieldbook. The rocks are occasionally overgrown by vegetation,
gray-green thorny bushes that are widely spaced so that you can walk
around them easily, and rocks are visible everywhere. The bushes make
me feel as if I am in a park. I love this place.
In the distance are the higher hills that embrace all of valleys A through
E. Those hills consist of sandstone, formed originally in rivers, millions
of years after the coastal environment of the Kuldana Formation. They
are black because of weathering, but cracking them with a hammer
brings out their true color: brick red. Together, they form the Miocene
Murree Formation, formed around thirty-five million years ago. The
rocks are like a poor club sandwich, five thin sections of Kuldana cheese
and cold-cuts separated by thick slices of Murree bread, and the entire
thing set down on its side. Even farther to the north, beyond where I can
see, are higher hills, made from light-gray limestones, formed in oceans
more than seventy million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the land.
The Kala Chitta Hills have preserved their history: the story of an ocean
that disappeared and was replaced by a massive river system (the precur-
sor to the Indus), and the high mountains to the north. Even the name
reflects the geology. Kala chitta is Punjabi for black and white: black for
the Murree, white for the limestones.
People do live here, mostly herders with goats, sheep, and camels. We
run into old men or boys who walk the flock, and Arif makes a point of
chatting with them. Unable to speak the language, I continue to work.
The mudstones, mostly alternating gray and purple, are found in the
older part of the Kuldana Formation (figure 17) and form the weath-
ered floor of most valleys. However, occasionally among these mud-
stones there is a coarse, very hard layer, brick-red to purple in color.
These are conglomerates, which look like layers of glued-together tiny
pebbles. The pebbles vary in size from sugargrains to peas. Breaking a
40 | Chapter 3
figure 17. A diagram (called a geological section) of the layers that make up the
Eocene of the Kala Chitta Hills in Pakistan. It shows the rocks that are found in a region
in sequence and how thick each layer is. The tilt of the layers reflects their real tilt.
Whales mentioned in this figure will be discussed in future chapters. Redrawn from
S. M.
Raza, “The Eocene Redbeds of the Kala Chitta Range (Northern Pakistan) and
its Stratigraphic Implications on Himalayan Foredeep Basin,” Geological Bulletin of
the University of Peshawar 34 (2001): 83–104; L. N Cooper, J. G. M. Thewissen, and
S. T. Hussain, “New Middle Eocene Archaeocetes (Cetacea:Mammalia) from the
Kuldana Formation of northern Pakistan,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29
(2009): 1289–98.
pebble, there may be bright whites and beiges, sometimes in bands, like
a mini gumball. The pebbles are rounded lumps—geologists call them
nodules. They form underground in hot, dry climates where groundwater evaporates. As the groundwater evaporates, the minerals dissolved in the water precipitate. These precipitates build layers, each mineral a different color, and form nodules. After the nodules were formed, a river came and washed away the mud that the nodules were formed
in, collecting all the nodules and sweeping them downstream.2 As the
flow slowed, the river was unable to move the nodules and dropped all
of them in what was probably an abandoned arm of the river channel.
That arm may have held water long after the flow of the river stopped,
forming a little lake. Subsequent cycles of rain, erosion, and mud deposition buried everything, including the bones of animals that died there.
Finally, after the layers were deeply buried, groundwater percolated
through them. The water carried calcium carbonate that precipitated
out and glued the nodules together. Geologists usually carry a little bottle with strong acid. A drop of it on the calcium carbonate will dissolve
A Whale with Legs | 41
it, and it will foam, like a shaken bottle of Sprite. Other rocks do not
respond that way, making this a test for identifying calcium carbonate.
One of these hard conglomerates is fossil locality 62, and this is
where the first fossil whale from Pakistan was found by Robert West,
The Walking Whales Page 6
