Horner explains the importance of matching the bones and the feathers. “We’re trying to get a snapshot in time of the history of the planet and piece together all the parts,” he says. “It could provide information for understanding our own ecology and fragility. Birds are dinosaurs, and therefore they’d be good to find. Insects and fish are cool too. Those give us a snapshot in time from 75 million years ago.”
The bones we find today are hollow, like those of a chicken. “The closest ancestors to birds are the nonavian dinosaurs,” Horner says. “They had hollow bones, and we don’t know why. Maybe they could run faster.” Liz comments, “If you’re going to be that big and fly, it’s a good thing to be hollow.”
Found in Mongolia: A velociraptor (left) attacking a protoceratops.
Both may have died in a sandstorm.
Image courtesy of D. Finnin © American Museum of Natural History
By the last day, Horner’s hair is flying straight up in the sky, and he says, “I’m going for the Einstein look today.” He watches a Shakira video on his iPod while we drive to another Psittacosaurus site, near the Flaming Cliffs that glow orange in the sunlight. Peddlers have been known to sell dinosaur bones to tourists at the top of the cliffs. “There is no control here,” Horner says, “and no regulation for digging here. The Chinese come in, dig, and take the stuff out on the train.”
No one finds any dinosaurs today except Ron, who single-handedly uncovers tons: ribs, legs, other bones, and a full Psittacosaurus skeleton in a rock. He is on a high, and everyone is excited for him. Horner even asks Ron if he would consider changing careers.
But now we have to jacket the dinosaurs, which makes you realize that finding the dinosaurs is the easy part. Jacketing means you wrap the skeleton for safe transport. Field jacketing involves making a cast out of plaster and burlap (though in our case, we use toilet paper) around the fossil. It’s like making a cast for a broken arm. To survive Mongolia’s bumpy roads, the jackets have to be really strong. We paint the skeleton with a solution called Vinac, which acts as an adhesive and also stabilizes and strengthens the fossil from the inside out. Then we mix water and cement in ziplock bags, soak the toilet paper in the plaster, and wrap the fossil.
The first fossil crumbles as we try to cast it. Horner radios us and asks if we are finished yet. He also tells us we have to do it faster. Talk about stress. In the middle of this, he radios to say that a lone woman on a horse has been riding around our camp and scoping out our sites. Everyone goes into a spin, and Horner rushes us even more. I find out why: Last year a group of grave robbers came and stole some jacketed fossils right off this exact hill we were digging.
Horner doesn’t want to leave any fossils lying around unguarded in case the interloper is a robber and smuggler. We finally cast and flip a Psittacosaurus successfully, and I get to name it: “Fantasaurus,” after all the Fanta the paleos have drunk this week. As we race back to camp to pack up and leave, we stumble across more dinosaur bones in places we have walked over a hundred times this week.
As I gaze out over the landscape, I can easily imagine how the dinosaurs lived here 80 million years ago. “There is a continuity of life on this spot,” Horner says. “When you come here, people in cities don’t have a sense of how small we are in the big evolutional picture. You’d never think there was such vibrant life on this vast, empty landscape.”
By the end of the expedition, we had discovered 67 Psittacosaurus skeletons. Horner calls our site Psittaco City. “If you had 67 people living together in Mongolia, it would be a city!”
Was our search worthwhile? Months after the Mongolia expedition, Horner calls me from his office back at the Museum of the Rockies: “It was a great success. We found an awful lot of stuff, and I’ll publish the full results soon.” (The specimens are currently being processed in Mongolia.) Horner is already preparing for his next dinosaur quest: “We’re going to dig up T. rexes next summer, a few more triceratops skeletons, a duck-billed dinosaur, and some eggs. Oh, and guess what?” he continues. “My ger arrived today. I was going to build it and put in my backyard, but we’re going to have it as the kitchen on the dig next summer. You’re coming, right?”
