Millions of years ago, a massive geological event called the Continental Drift took place. Before this, the world as we know it didn’t exist. Instead, there were supercontinents or gigantic land masses that comprised of the continents that we know today. India was part of Gondwanaland, which included Australia, Africa, Antarctica, India, and South America. It was about 150 million years ago that India broke off from Gondwanaland and began to move north, approaching Eurasia.
The Tethys Sea, which lay between the two landforms, had a rich and diverse marine life. It took about a hundred million years for the two landforms to collide, but when they did, it was with so much power that the dense crusts of both, crushed together by the immense force, rose upward, forming mountains that rose from beneath the sea.
Even today, the layered rocks of the Himalayas are rich with the fossils of the inhabitants that once populated the Tethys Sea, as well as fossils of coral reef remnants and marine plants. Pretty much most of these mountains with fossils in them were once deep under an ocean.