A Rock Solid Guy

AFTER poring over toposheets and maps with his assistants on a sunny morning last week, Pradip Kumar Bose is on the road again. At a highway motel in scorched Maihar, which will be his home over the next fortnight, Bose moves around casually in his customary kurta-pyjama; rues that he has no time to catch up with the latest theatre back home in Calcutta and, of course, discusses rocks. Back on the road, the metamorphosis of the wandering geologist is complete: the jean-clad explorer, hammer clipped to his belt, pocket lens slung around his neck, a floppy sunhat on his head, hunting for rocks, talking about rocks, and thinking about rocks. "We are walking," he mutters in between, "in what used to be a shallow sea or a lagoon millions of years ago." Look around and all you see is a craggy sea of rocks, fine chocolate brown sandstone, mud pebbles, mud stone beds and mica-laden shells melting into the Vindhyas, the imposing hill ranges straddling over a lakh square kms and running through Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. "This is an addiction, looking for rocks," says the 56-year-old geologist, taking in a deep breath near a rivulet. "I am always trying to find out something novel, this chase keeps on going."

Bose's magnificent obsession with rocks, fuelled by spending more than two months every year for the past 30 years in the fields, has already turned in a stunning result, which promises to rewrite evolutionary history. Far away from the sizzling fields of Maihar, in the US, the latest issue of the prestigious American journal Science has showcased the sterling achievement of a remote, self-effacing geologist from Calcutta: Bose has stumbled on to hard evidence that the first multiple-celled animals with body fluid evolved about 1.1 billion years ago. This finding stretches back the chronology of animal life by a clear 500 million years—hitherto, the earliest known fossil records from Namibia and China indicated that multi-celled animals evolved around 600 million years ago. But Bose's path-breaking find—wiggly grooves on the surface of ancient sandstone near a busy road crossing in Churhat—is staggering and raises exciting questions about the way we look at the evolutionary process. The geologist himself, however, is not unduly bothered with the worldwide attention his paper in Science is attracting. "I haven't seen the journal, but somebody told me it is on the Internet," says Bose, who shells out Rs 7,000 a year to subscribe to just two scientific journals by surface mail and is still waiting for an Internet connection at the prestigious Calcutta-based Jadavpur University. He has taught in the geology department for the past 27 years, and became its head last year.

But then Bose is the quintessential hermetic Indian scientist, who travels by bus to work, by second-class train to field work, trying to save money for hiring cars and jeeps to reach the far-flung geological sites across the country, and obsessed with grooming students. At his university, he has seen dwindling budgets limit subscriptions to international journals from 82 to a mere 27 today and laboratory infrastructure stagnate. But Bose, who picked up a doctorate after taking up studying geology in a trivial pursuit—"I had no idea about what I would do after studying geology," he says—has no complaints. "If you are an Indian scientist," he says matter-of-factly, "you have to work in an Indian context, which means coping with shortages and problems."

So Bose soldiers on unfettered with his assistants and students in Maihar's sea of rocks in a blazing summer. For years, he has been passionately engaged in building up the sedimentary history of India with keen fellow geologists after traversing different sedimentary basins. (After completing his doctorate from Jadavpur University when he wrote a dissertation on coal and associated sedimentary rocks, he specialised in sedimentology, a geological discipline which deals with sediments and their alterations near earth surfaces.) One of the many interesting facets of sedimentology is detection of trace fossils in rocks. Hunting four summers ago in the Vindhyas around Churhat with his hawk-eyed assistant Subir Sarkar, a 36-year-old lecturer at Jadavpur University and one of India's finest field sedimentologists, the duo stumbled on to a sandstone rock imprinted with a ladder-like trail mark. The mark strongly suggested an organism which moved along the sea floor with alternate contractions and expansion of its body. Ergo, the imprint indicated that the organism had body fluid, was multicellular and was indeed a coelomate metazoan in its biological moniker. The excited duo rushed back to Calcutta, wrote out a paper in early 1995 for publication in a German journal the following year. Sitting in Germany, the journal editor Adolf Seilacher, the world famous palaeobiologist, who divides his teaching time between Tubingen University at home and Yale, realised that the Indian duo was on to something very very big. He offered his services. "We hadn't emphasised the palaeobio-logical part in our finding," says Bose. "So the German effort came in handy to expand on the finding."

With 72-year-old Seilacher, the Sherlock Holmes of palaeobiology in tow, Bose undertook two gruelling fortnight-long trips to Churhat in 1996 and 1997. Last summer's trip, funded entirely by the participating geologists, confirmed the existence of burrowing animal forms in other trace fossil samples. Clearly, they were made by worm-like organisms living in burrows. Collecting all evidence and putting them through established sophisticated dating techniques—namely the vision track method and potassium argon dating—he concluded that the intriguing trace fossil on the Churhat sandstone was about 1.1 billion years old. The paper was written up in six months, and Bose was sent the final eight-page draft by Seilacher a few months ago. Suddenly it seemed that the history of evolution might have to be rewritten. "I knew it was a significant discover y, but I never imagined it would attract such attention," says the unassuming geologist, sipping piping hot tea at the remote motel on a starless night last week.

But why not? For one, there was no hard evidence till the Bose revelations that such life actually existed over a billion years ago. Granted, microbiologists have often predicted that triploblastic organisms—animals that developed from an embryo and contain three outer membranes—hark back to at least a billion years ago, no evidence had been forthcoming. Agrees Charles Marshall, an expert on evolution from the University of California, Los Angeles: "If this find is true, it provides the first evidence of macroscopic (visible) animals."

MORE significantly, the Bose finding promises to throw up a slew of intriguing posers to experts like Marshall. May be even a fresh appraisal of conventional evolutionary theories. What intrigues Bose most is how primitive life forms like bacteria and algae flourished and dominated the environment for centuries, while the more able multi-cellular organisms who were mobile enough failed to do so. "Multicellular organisms didn't become extinct all right, but they didn't flourish either," he says. What about the gap of 500 million years between the time they appeared in the Vindhyas and in Namibia and China, as earlier evidence indicates? Should the Darwinian theory about survival of the fittest be then seriously questioned?

These posers spin in Bose's restless mind most of the time these days even as he treks miles in the foothills of Maihar studying sedimentary basins. But then evolution is a puzzling conundrum, and even algae, bacteria and mammals have suffered sharp declines in their evolutionary history. "How life started, how it evolved, the study goes on for more clues," he says absent-mindedly, peering through his pocket lens into a reddish sandstone with the spots of a jelly-like organism embedded on it. "Ah, this is about 550 million years old." He loves the quiet rocky basins of Maihar: "This is a treasure trove of sedimentary structures."

From the backstreets of grimy Howrah, where Bose grew up, the son of a government clerk, to a presence on the pages of Science has been a long, strange trip for this idealistic man of science. After completing his doctorate, he had spent nearly five years as post-doctoral research fellow at the Punjab and Jadavpur universities, before he finally joined the faculty at his alma mater in 1971. Unlike jet-setting glam-scientists who love their instruments more than the field, Bose has travelled abroad only once: in 1981, he spent nine months in the UK and the US on a Unesco fellowship. There too, the call of the field snared him to the boon docks of North Wales working on features of storm sedimentation. "I am an ordinary field man," he says. "I am not meritorious, but I do work sincerely. And yes, I love working in the field."

This leaves him with very little time for his family—his wife Sriradha, a doctorate in physics herself who chose to teach in a school to look after their only daughter and run a good home. So little time that Bose doesn't know "much about the preparations" in progress for his daughter Gargi's wedding in December.

For a moment, in the rocks of Maihar, Bose's face lights up. "You know what my only aspiration is," he says. "It is getting appreciation from all over the world. That's why I am not impressed by doctoral degrees. I am impressed by the number of international publications a scientist has, how he has fought with his peers abroad with his work." Pradip Kumar Bose, the rolling stone who gathers no moss, surely has won the battle.