We pass herds upon herds of horses. The horses are small and compact and fast as hell. The Mongols riding them in hats and long coats belted at the waist are their human equivalent: small and compact and strong as hell. The gers (traditional tents that Mongolian nomads live in) look like round white tepees. Each ger differs only in the color of its wooden front door. The wealthiest ger owners have satellite dishes outside. Some even have small windmills to generate power. Even though a ger is the Mongolian equivalent of a double-wide, they really seem to fit into the landscape. Horner looks out the window at the simple beauty of the land and says, “We Americans have complicated the art of living.”
On the drive, the landscape starts out green and lush, filled with herds of goats, sheep, and fuzzy-tailed yaks and cattle. But as we get closer to the Gobi, the landscape changes. There are more rocky outcrops and no more roads or power lines. We see Bactrian camels, and when we stop to stretch our legs, we smell the wild onions that grow in the bush.
Arriving at Base Camp
As we near the small area known as Oosh, our destination, the vans circle and then stop on a ridge that looks like every other ridge we have passed in the past few hours. But we are here. The Mongolians jump out of the vans and shout, “Yo Ya!”—Let’s go!
I peel myself out of the van, stiff and apprehensive. What am I doing here? I’m as far away from anywhere as I’ve ever been, I know nothing about dinosaurs, and if they left me here, I would never find my way back, much less survive. It’s a weird feeling.
Setting up base camp is our first job. We construct the first ger (our food tent) and secure our individual tents so they can survive any sandstorm. One of the geologists, Jonathan Geisler, who’s married to Bolor, helps me with mine. It is windy and hot in the sun. The Mongolian students unload large plastic tubs filled with paleontology tools and casting materials used to preserve dinosaur bones. The drivers and the students then begin to construct the ger that will be our mess tent, kitchen, and the heart and soul of our camp. The door to the ger always faces southeast because the winds blow from the northeast.
We eat a quick lunch of cheese sandwiches, hiding from the sun in the shade of the army trucks and talking about Jurassic Park. Horner says: “Like didn’t you notice there were all these plant-eating dinosaurs, and all they were trying to eat were people? And dinosaurs don’t go anywhere near the speed they go in the movie.” He admits that Spielberg and company had to make things somewhat unrealistic or the movie would have been a documentary. And then: “OK. Enough eatin’. I want to go find myself a skeleton.”
Homer's rule of thumb: Find three or more bones
in the same spot and its a skeleton.
Image courtesy of Ron Lodge
The Hunt Begins
Horner has already given us a full profile of Psittacosaurus, the dinosaur whose apt name means “parrot lizard.” It was a plant eater that walked on two legs and was about four feet long with a curved beak and odd horns sticking out from the middle of its cheeks. Imagine a dinosaur the size of a golden retriever but with a head that looks like an oversize parrot’s. In its day, Psittacosaurus was far from exotic, which of course is exactly the point of this expedition. “I like dinosaurs that I can get lots of so I can do statistical studies of growth and so on,” Horner explains.
