A national park near Shahpura in Madhya Pradesh, India, made out of a field of plant fossils: 31 genera in 18 families identified so far, with palms the most striking of them, along with leaves, fruit, seeds and shells, some as old as 65 million years. Dr Dharmendra Prasad, a district statistical officer and honorary secretary of the local archaeology unit, recognised what the villagers were walking over and got the site founded in the 1970s; it was declared a national park in 1983. A fossil wood with eucalyptus-like features found here may be the oldest of its type known anywhere, which would say something about how plants moved around Gondwana, and a dinosaur egg has come out of the same ground. It lies 14 kilometres from Shahpura and 76 from Jabalpur.
Petrified palms, leaves, fruit and seeds · Late Cretaceous to Paleogene, ~65 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
India
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