Where: Gujarat, India (23.7° N, 68.7° E: paleocoordinates 10.3° N, 62.9° E)

• coordinate based on political unit

When: Panandhro Formation, Bartonian (41.3 - 38.0 Ma)

• "..snake bearing silty shales form part of the Panandhro Formation of Saraswati & Banerjee (1984) or its broadly correlatable unit designated as Naredi Formation by Biswas (1992) (pg. 696)."

•

•Our previous age inference for these beds (Bajpai and Thewissen, 2002) was based on the traditional inclusion of them in the Naredi Formation, which followed Biswas (1992). Biswas (1992) considered the Naredi Formation to range from late Paleocene to early Eocene in age. While this age estimate may be reasonable at the type section of the formation (where there is neither lignite nor fossil cetaceans), it appears that this is not the case at Panandhro and Akri Lignite Mines. Here, the stratigraphy is more complex and the beds yielding the whales are best included in the Panandhro Formation of Saraswati and Banerjee (1984, preferred here) or the Lakhpat Formation of Mukhopadhyay and Shome (1996). These beds are equivalent in age to the Harudi Formation: middle/late Lutetian. The Domanda Formation of central Pakistan is also Lutetian in age (Gingerich et al., 2001a).

•

•Saraswati et al. 2014: The present study refers the fossil-bearing strata of Panandhro to planktic zone P12-P13 and the Bartonian Stage. This validates the strontium stratigraphy within the limit of the analytical error. Some of the estimated ages (see Table 1; Ravikant and Bajpai, 2010) are close to the base of the Bartonian (41.2 Ma as per Gradstein et al., 2012). Therefore, the age of the Panandhro fauna is indisputably Bartonian and more so when the authors report them to have been washed down from the overlying beds.

• formation-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: mire or swamp; poorly lithified, silty shale

Size class: macrofossils

Collection methods: surface (float), mechanical,

Primary reference: S. Bajpai and J. G. M. Thewissen. 2002. Vertebrate fauna from Panandhro lignite field (Lower Eocene), District Kachchh, western India. Current Science 82(5):507-509 [M. Uhen/M. Uhen/J. Alroy]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 48074: authorized by Jason Head, entered by Jason Head on 12.03.2005, edited by Mark Uhen

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)