Qualla: Kota Formation

Kota Formation: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adbh266, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somewhere beneath the red soil of Telangana, roughly 200 million years ago, a freshwater lake teemed with coelacanths. These ancient fish, often called living fossils, swam alongside sharks and gar-like predators in warm shallows bordered by alluvial fans. The Kota Formation preserves this vanished world in limestone and sandstone layers up to 590 meters thick, stretching across the Pranhita-Godavari Valley of peninsular India. It is one of the subcontinent's richest windows into Jurassic life, a place where paleontologists have unearthed not only fish and insects but some of India's earliest known dinosaurs and mammals.

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Image: Adbh266 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kota Formation: Gondwana's Hidden Lake

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Show_ryu, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the Early Jurassic, India was still locked into the supercontinent Gondwana, and the Pranhita-Godavari basin was an active continental rift slowly pulling apart. The Kota Formation records the sediments that filled this rift: mudstones from floodplains, sandstones from riv...

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Image: Show_ryu | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kota Formation: A Bestiary in Stone

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The formation's fossil catalogue reads like a census of Jurassic life. Indocoelacanthus robustus, a freshwater coelacanth measuring up to 70 centimeters, is the largest animal found here and belongs to the same family as the famous Latimeria, which still survives in the Indian Oc...

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Image: Public domain

Kota Formation: Where Dinosaurs Met Their First Mammals

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TotalDino, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Kota Formation is one of the few places on Earth where Early Jurassic dinosaurs and mammals have been found together. Kotasaurus yamanpalliensis, a primitive nine-meter sauropod discovered at Yamanapalli village, is among the most basal sauropods known. Remains of at least tw...

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Image: TotalDino | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kota Formation: A Puzzle of Deep Time

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Barbacka, Evelyn Kustatscher & Emese R. Bodor, CC BY 4.0. The Kota Formation's age remains one of Indian paleontology's persistent debates. Most researchers place it in the Early Jurassic, around 190 to 180 million years ago, constrained by the Hettangian or Sinemurian age of the underlying Dharmaram Formation. But palynological studies...

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Image: Maria Barbacka, Evelyn Kustatscher & Emese R. Bodor | CC BY 4.0

Kota Formation: Reading the Rocks Today

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Angel Antonio Caminero Góimez, CC BY-SA 3.0 es. The Kota Formation outcrops along limestone ridges near the villages of Boraigudem, Kota, and Paikasigudem in what is now Telangana state. The terrain is gently rolling, with red laterite soils giving way to pale limestone exposures along stream cuts. At Paikasigudem, the Upper M...

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Image: Angel Antonio Caminero Góimez | CC BY-SA 3.0 es