Modern figure
Birbal Sahni
ਬੀਰਬਲ ਸਾਹਨੀبیربل ساہنی
Palaeobotanist from Bhera who read the history of India's plants in its rocks and founded the institute in Lucknow that bears his name.
Birbal Sahni was born in 1891 at Bhera, on the Jhelum, the son of the Lahore chemist Ruchi Ram Sahni, and studied at Government College Lahore and Cambridge.
He became the founder of palaeobotany in India, studying fossil plants to reconstruct the ancient flora and geology of the subcontinent, and in 1946 founded what is now the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences at Lucknow. He died in 1949, a week after its foundation stone was laid.