Living World / Dinosaurs

I’m standing at the baggage carousel in Genghis Khan airport in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, accompanied by paleontologist Jack Horner and his team of dinosaur hunters, preparing for an expedition out into the badlands and way back into time. We collect our gear (sleeping bags, tent, multiple layers of clothing) and drive to the Genghis Khan Hotel for one night’s sleep and a half day of sightseeing before the three-day drive to the Gobi Desert. There we will dig for two weeks in the capricious climate (hot sun, wind, snow, rain) and sleep in tents with no showers or bathrooms, looking for Psittacosaurus—a parrotlike dinosaur that was abundant in the area some 100 million years ago.

Horner, who comes to Mongolia every year to excavate, is focusing on Psittacosaurus this time because he needs to collect a lot of bones from the same species of dinosaur. Then he can run statistical studies on how the dinosaurs grew and changed as they aged. Mongolia was home to flocks of probably thousands of them, which makes Psittacosaurus perfect for this experiment. As Horner says, “I figured I could get more Psittacosaurus bones in the shortest period of time than any other dinosaur.”

Paleontologists have been descending on Mongolia—politics permitting—since Roy Chapman Andrews’s legendary expeditions in the 1920s, and they still come in droves every summer. (The summer months are the only time when conditions are bearable to dig; the rest of the year it is too snowy or cold.) At the Genghis Khan Hotel’s breakfast buffet that first morning, Horner runs into colleagues from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Also known as the "parrot lizard," Psittacosaurus
stood about two feet tall and was
presumably a common sight in Mongolia
during the Early Cretaceous.

Image courtesy of Craig Chesek
© American Museum of Natural History

But where there are paleontologists, there are also smugglers, and Mongolia’s rich treasure of Cretaceous Period (145 million to 65 million years ago) dinosaur fossils is under siege. Smugglers have even gotten so bold that they’ve taken specimens right off the dig sites while paleontologists break for lunch. Then they smuggle the fossils across the border by train to Russia and China and auction them off to collectors in countries like Japan and Germany.

Meanwhile, Mongolia’s political instabilities since the overthrow of a Communist regime in favor of a nominally democratic one in 1992 have cost the dinosaurs a proper official home. The Communist government was about to build a new paleontology museum, but the project died along with the regime and its budget. Now Mongolia doesn’t have proper facilities to keep up with the enormous volume of fossils discovered here. Most of the bones lie in overcrowded storerooms of the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. “Dinosaurs are the one thing to see when you come to Mongolia,” Horner says. “The museum of Mongolia should be the best thing here.”

Instead, the interior of the Natural History Museum is a run-down mess. A dilapidated stairwell leads up to a creaking hallway with cracked and stained walls and two disappointing dinosaur rooms. One is home to the most famous and important set of dinosaur skeletons in the world, the perfectly preserved remains of a vicious velociraptor and a plant-eating protoceratops who apparently died in the middle of a fight. Scientists think a storm collapsed a sand dune and smothered the two creatures suddenly. The velociraptor has a broken right arm and is gripping the head of the protoceratops while jamming his leg into the protoceratops’s ribs. It is unbelievable to see a skeleton so lifelike. As I stand there looking at the giants, I imagine what else is out there, buried or surfacing among the sandy soil and dry rocks of the cold and windy Gobi Desert.