  We present a calculation of the leading order QCD fragmentation functions for
gluons to split into spin-triplet D-wave quarkonia. We apply them to evaluate
the gluon fragmentation contributions to inclusive ^3D_J quarkonium production
at large transverse momentum processes like the Tevatron and find that the
D-wave quarkonia, especially the charmonium 2^{--} state, could be observed
through color-octet mechanism with present luminosity. Since there are
distinctively large gaps between the contributions of two different (i.e,
color-singlet and color-octet) quarkonium production mechanisms, our results
may stand as a unique test to NRQCD color-octet quarkonium production
mechanism.
