Balochistan Post, Sunday, December 03, 2000



A team of Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP) has made Pakistan's first-ever discovery of dinosaur fossils in Barkhan district of Balochistan, said Director GSP Abdul Latif here on Saturday.



He said that the discovery was made during the course of geological mapping and bio-stratigraphic research in the area by GSP and these studies are still on. "With this discovery, Pakistan is now among a very few countries of the world where dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Earlier most of these discoveries have been made in different parts of north and south America and recently in China and Mongolia," he added.



Dinosaurs were giant reptiles, the largest being 7 meters in height and 14 meters in length. They were dominant land animals during most of the Mesozoic era (from 225 to 65 million years ago), but became extinct towards its close.



According to the GSP official, the dinosaur fossils discovered in Balochistan are of locomotary limbs. They have been recovered from the top of the Pab formation of Maastrichtian (Late Cretaccous) age which represents a period of seven million years ranging form 72 to 65 millions years before present in the geological time scale.



"The GSP discovery attains special significance as the dinosaur fossils horizon in Pakistan is close to the period of dinosaurs extinction which is estimated at about 65 million years ago," he said. "This thrilling discovery is expected to produce interest in local and global geo-scientific community opening up several new avenues of research such as paleo-geographic location of the sea; past land bridges in south and central Asia and the migratory pathways for dinosaurs and other land animals," he added.



Latif observed that it would also be of great value in the correlation of the worldwide phenomena of Irdlum anomaly associated with the close of the Cretaceous period and the extinction of dinosaurs. He said another significant aspect of the GSP's discovery is that it has been made in the upper part of the Pab formation. "This rock formation underlies a large area in Sindh and Balochistan and parts of this formation are regarded to have considerable hydrocarbon potential.



This new fossils discovery will shed new light on the paleo-environment and depositional history of the Pab formation particularly with reference to interpreting the fluctuating land sea levels during the Cretacceous period; and the supply of organic material to the sediments which eventually become the source material for oil and gas," he said.



Referring to the supplementary material, Latif said that most types of dinosaurs continued to flourish until the very latest phases of the Cretaceous period. Then, with the next one million years, they disappeared completely from the geological record. He said the cause of this sudden demise is not clear. "One widely accepted explanation for this mass extinction has been that a major geological cycle of mountains building at the end of the Cretaceous period reduced the low-land areas in which dinosaurs flourished and also changed the world's climate," he added.



According to the GSP official, a more recent theory postulates an astronomical catastrophe as the cause: a collision between asteroid and the earth generated a huge dust cloud that caused a period of darkness lasting as long as three years. This blockage of sunlight made photosynthesis virtually impossible and resulted in collapse of food. This led to the worldwide extinction of the dinosaurs and many other life forms. Although this hypothesis has been partially substantiated by geological evidences, the apparent survival of some types of dinosaurs for as long as 1,000,000 years after the presumed asteroid impact raises doubts that this catastrophe was the only cause of the eventual disappearance of dinosaurs. It is possible that both climatic change and an asteroid impact played a part in the extinction of the largest animals that ever walked on the surface of the earth.