Indian Lias -

The name never stuck. Today, we call it the Lower Gondwana sequence. But for one romantic century, mapmakers scribbled “Indian Lias” over tracts of Telangana, imagining prehistoric sea dragons swimming where tigers now roam.

Turns out, "Lias" is a classic European term for a layer of Jurassic marine rocks (famous for fossilized ammonites). British geologists, upon landing in India, tried to force-fit the subcontinent’s complex geography into European nicknames. They called certain fossil-rich Triassic beds in the Pranhita-Godavari basin the "Indian Lias." indian lias

It started as a typo. I was trying to write “Indian lies” (as in, the little white lies we tell ourselves about productivity), but autocorrect gave me “Lias.” I liked it better. The name never stuck