The Shivalik Fossil Park, Suketi

The Shivalik Fossil Park spreads over about 15 square kilometres of forest at Suketi, also spelled Saketi, in the Markanda River valley of Sirmaur district, Himachal Pradesh, where the Siwalik range forms the southernmost and geologically youngest division of the Himalayas. The Geological Survey of India discovered the site in 1969, established the park with the state government on 23 March 1974, and notified it as a National Geological Monument the same year.

The hills are mostly mudstone, sandstone and conglomerate. The park sits on the Saketi Formation, the lower part of the Upper Siwalik, and the Tatrot Formation of the Middle Siwalik, dating to the Upper Pliocene, while the wider Siwalik Group spans roughly 10 to 1.5 million years and is packed with the bones of big mammals. Locals often stumble on fossil elephant tusks along the beds and banks of the Markanda, a visiting writer for the Wildlife Conservation Trust noted.

Out in the open stand six life-sized fibreglass models in a recreated landscape of about 2.5 million years ago: a sabre-toothed cat, a short-legged hippopotamid, a giant tortoise far larger than its modern relatives, a long-tusked proboscidean, a four-horned giraffe with a big skull and short neck, and an extinct crocodilian of the gharial family. The Stegodon ganesa model, with tusks 4 to 5 metres long, shows over the museum's boundary wall. The Tribune called the tortoise the largest of all tortoises, living here in large numbers about 2.5 million years ago, and counted fifteen species of giant elephant in the Shivalik region.

The Siwalik Fossil Museum opened inside the park in May 2014, in a blue-green Geological Survey building. Its cases hold jaws and skulls of Stegodon insignis and Stegodon ganesa, the hippopotamus Hexaprotodon sivalensis, Enhydriodon sivalensis, Colossochelys atlas, Gavialis browni, Sivatherium giganteum and Paramachairodus, along with turtle shells, fish and crocodilian teeth, early Palaeolithic stone tools, and finds made in the area by Proby Cautley, among them remains considered some of the oldest evidence of human ancestors in Asia. When the Wildlife Conservation Trust writer visited, a guide from a nearby town talked the group through the cases in Hindi.