A routine field trip of students recently led to an astounding discovery. Post-graduate researchers from Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University stumbled across 15-million-year-old marine fossils in Mayurbhanj district, revealing that parts of Odisha were once under an ancient sea. The fossils are from the Miocene geological epoch, when the Indian tectonic plate crashed into the Eurasian plate and pushed up the Himalayas. It’s not the first time students have made an epochal find. Curious students in Rome this year found a second-century luxury villa under their school gym. In 2024, students in Mexico found a massive Maya city centuries after it had disappeared under a forest canopy. All of it proves a tenet that India’s most consequential educationists held true—Tagore, Aurobindo and Krishnamurti exhorted students to seek knowledge outside classrooms.