A protected palaeontological site at Suketi in the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, in the Markanda valley in the Siwalik foothills of the Himalaya, spread over about 15 square kilometres of forest. The Geological Survey of India found it in 1969 and set the park up with the state government on 23 March 1974, the same year it was notified as a National Geological Monument. The rock is the Saketi Formation of the Upper Siwalik and the Tatrot Formation below it, and the animals in it are the big Plio-Pleistocene mammals of the ancestral Ganges plain. Six life-sized fibreglass models stand out in a reconstructed landscape of about 2.5 million years ago, and the museum on site holds the bones they were built from.
Siwalik giants: Stegodon, Colossochelys, hippo and crocodile · Plio-Pleistocene, ~2.5 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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