Beyond the Desk
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” Henri Cartier Bresson
In 2018, four intrepid travellers trail blazed across the Gobi Desert in the footsteps of American Naturalist, Roy Chapman-Andrews, in search of dinosaur fossils.
Dragon Hunters of the Gobi
“It looks like rock to me,” I said, failing to grasp the significance of what I was holding
Assembling fragments of a turtle shell on the dining table in our Yurt
BUGIN TSAV
The Bugin Tsav fields of the south western Gobi are somewhat otherworldly. If you saw NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover crossing the rocky landscape, you perhaps wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Fossilised therapod footprints, clams, fragmented turtle shell and discarded parts from Tarbosaurus that had probably been left behind from previous expeditions. A number of paleontological expeditions have explored the fields in the past, with all sorts of wondrous finds, including fossilised eggs, contributing to the understanding of dinosaur embryology.
The tools of discovery; and of course, the all critical modern day GPS
Bugin TSAV
Not far from our camp, our palaeontologist came across a glimpse of a potential specimen, protruding from the ground. A painstaking afternoon of excavation allowed him to jacket the specimen with a gauze, smeared with plaster of paris, reducing the risk of it disintegrating when removed from the ground and transported back to the Institute of Palaeontology in Ulaan Bataar. Although fossil smuggling is strictly illegal in Mongolia, it still remains a major problem.
Meta-tarsal of a therapod
THE NEMEGT FORMATION
We found this portion of a meta-tarsal on the slopes of the Nemegt formation in the southern Gobi. It’s a canyon like formation, with dried river beds and limestone cliffs, dating from the late cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago.