“Just this year, I’d read in the newspaper that researchers from the Geological Survey of India and the Indian Institute of Technology had discovered a new extinct species of hybodont shark in the Jaisalmer Basin of Rajasthan. Over thirty teeth specimens collected from the region proved that the species lived about 160 and 168 million years ago. The extinct shark from Jaisalmer was named S. Jaisalmerensis.
I was another Jaisalmerensis floating into extinction and the beginning of the Karakum Desert appeared in front of my putrefying eyes like the event horizon.”
I wrote a two-part piece for MAP Magazine’s year of Carte Blanche and Other Chimeras.
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/our-lady-of-the-forest-i
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/our-lady-of-the-forest-ii
With thanks to Daniela Cascella, the commissioning editor, for her friendship and understanding of the strange.