The Deep History of Life: 3 Billion years ago by Andrew Knoll (winner Crawford Award 2022)

Tethys Fossil Museum & Research center which is coming up at Dhangiari a small village in Kasauli Tehsil of the Indian Himalaya.

The museum is well connected with the Chandigarh International Airport via road and rail and the 90 minutes drive takes you from a few million years to 200 million years.

Geologically museum is located on the debris concealing the Dagshai -Subathu boundary which signifies the closure of Tethys sea and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystem.

The museum is built from 20 million year rocks of Kasauli Sandstone beautiful chiseled to give the museum an aesthetic look.

Water that we drink in the museum is from a borewell drilled into 40 million years old white quartzite sandstone which is a marker bed extending from Pakistan to Burma in the least.

Tethys Museum will display diverse well-Preserved fossils of Stromatolites Edia Cara, Trilobites, Molluscs, Ammonites, etc from Spiti valley Fishes, whales Sharks, oysters molluscan foraminifera from Subathu and Leh, plant remains consisting of logs of trees, leaves, flowers, roots, etc from Kasauli and Dharamsala, and mammals from Shiwaliks. Signifying the gradual evolution of life on this planet and the development of the mighty Himalayas. All these fossils are part of the museum repository. So anyone visiting the museum will have a glimpse of how different fossils collected from different geological formations across the Himalayas can help to rebuild the entire paleohistory of the various events which led to the evolution and Birth of The Himalayas.

Tethys as we all know was an ocean once upon a time separating India from Tibet/Eurasia.

As the Indian plate moved northward the Tethys sea squeezed and when the two plates collided the Tethyan sediments were uplifted forming the mighty Himalaya.

Lots of research has been done in timing the collision of the two plates leading to the evolution and birth of the Tethyan Himalayas. But still, there is no consensus and there are Himalayan opportunities for researchers to come up with a convincing model to time the collision and explain the birth of the Himalayas.

Keeping this in mind, the organizing committee of Tethy fossil museum and Research center decided to host a series of lectures by veteran geologists who dedicated their lives to understanding this geo mechanism.