Toronto: A retired Indian geologist who made an internationally renowned discovery in the 1960s in Canada, then gave up his North American career to build a village school in India, has received a rare honour -- a 565-million-year-old fossil has been named after him.

Canadian government ministers, bureaucrats and scientists attended a recent meeting in Canada's Portugal Cove South city where two top geologists -- Guy Narbonne from Canada and Jim Gehling from Australia -- announced the new name of one of the many fossils discovered by Dr S B Misra in the late 1960s.

Misra's discovery, the oldest record of multicellular life on earth, shall now be called Fractofusus misrai.

Mistaken Point, the site of Misra's discovery, has since been declared a protected area by the government of Canada and no damage to the rocks and fossils is allowed any more.

Geo-scientists from Canada are making all efforts to get the site declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

At the ceremony, Narbonne read out an e-mail sent by him to Misra which said, "Your name appears as the discoverer of the Mistaken Point fossils...will be seen by thousands of people every summer."

Narbonne wrote from the Queen's University at Ontario, Canada, "You should feel quite pleased at the huge role you played in discovering this world-famous fossil site."