Guwahati, India - Indian geologists have stumbled across dinosaur fossils they say date back 70 million years in the northeastern state of Meghalaya, officials said on Monday.
The team, from the state-run Geological Survey of India (GSI), said they came across the fossils at a village about 165km from the state capital of Shillong while on a trip to explore petroleum reserves.
The geologists identified the village as Dirang and said it was located in the rugged West Khasi Hills district of the remote Indian state, bordering Bangladesh.
"The dinosaur bones were discovered from the coarse-grained sand stones ... in the West Khasi Hills, and laboratory tests confirmed the fossils were about 70 million years old," said GSI deputy director BP Bhattacharyya.
If correct, the discovery of the fossils is the first find of a large prehistoric creature such as a dinosaur in eastern India.
UK Mishra, a paleontologist, said the rare find appears to be plausible.
"The entire northeastern region (of India) has abundant fossils dating back to about 60 to 65 million years. It could be possible that parts of the region was under sea," Mishra said.
The GSI had earlier claimed discovery of remains of smaller sea creatures as old as 65 million years from other parts of Meghalaya.
The organisation has proposed setting up of a fossil park to preserve the remains of creatures dating back to the late Cretaceous period, just before the dinosaurs became extinct.
Experts say Meghalaya is one of the few areas in the world where sedimentary layers from earlier time periods have been scraped off by nature, exposing a rich cache of fossils and even complete dinosaur skeletons.
In the last three decades, Indian experts have claimed to have found a variety of plant and marine fossils from the other northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland. - Sapa-AFP