¡®India has rich ecological history with presence of dinosaurs¡¯, IFS Parveen Kaswan tweeted sometime ago, and it has revived our interest in the history of dinosaurs in India.?
The first dinosaur fossil was discovered in India in 1828, it was sent to the Indian Museum in Kolkata and London, and this dinosaur genus was named Titanosaurus by an English naturalist and geologist, Richard Lydekkar.?
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However the most interesting piece of trivia?the IFS enlightened Twitterati with, is about a dinosaur that is named after the poet, writer and First Nobel prize winner of India - Rabindranath Tagore.
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He tweeted, ¡®Barapasaurus #tagorei was a 18 metre long & 7 tonned #dinosaur which walked through #India once. It was the first complete mounted dinosaur skeleton discovered in 1960s in Adilabad district of #India¡¯.
Rabindranath Tagore still has a lot of impact on Indian literature and music, he is considered the predecessor of Bengali Renaissance and Indian Modernism, and Rabindra Sangeet is his legacy. It is another honour on his list of many, for one of the oldest creatures to have ever existed on earth, to be named after him.?
The species tagorei Barapasaurus was located in the lower part of Kota Formation and it is one of the most completely known sauropods.?
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Dmitri Bogdanov
Talking about etymology, Bara in a lot of Indian languages means ¡®big¡¯, pa means ¡®leg¡¯ even in Bengali and saurus as we know means ¡®lizard¡¯. So Barapasaurus is the ¡®big-legged lizard¡¯.?
The first year of field work on the fossil was carried out in the centenary year of Tagore¡¯s birth.?
Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He declined Knighthood that British offered him, after the Jallianwalla Bagh incident. He wrote the national anthem for our country and even Bangladesh. Even the Sri Lankan national anthem is known to be inspired by his work.