Dragon Hunters of the Gobi

“It looks like rock to me,” I said in ignorance, not fully comprehending that what I was holding was probably part of a femur of a large sauropod dinosaur that would have plodded around this neck of the woods in the late cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago.

Indeed, some 70 million years ago, the Gobi Desert would have been a very, very different place. It’s not often you find fossilised clams or fragments of turtle shell on remote desert outcrops; but here, in the Bugin Tsav fields of the southern Gobi, they are not uncommon.

“In the late cretaceous period, the Gobi would have had quite a different climate, with inland seas, lakes and marsh land,” said Khatanbataar Purevdorj, a palaeontologist and our guide.

“Look at these,” he said, pointing to fossilised footprints in the desert floor, “you can see the three toes of a large therapod very clearly.” he continued. Indeed, we could: they lay before us, like some giant maple leaf, tracking across the ground.

Later that afternoon, the excitement literally bubbled over with hopes of a potential find on the slopes of the formation, about 2 kilometres from our camp.

“See how there are two or three fossilised bones in a curve. It could be part of tail or perhaps even a spine,” Khatanbataar said in excitement, while he knelt down, unpacking the tools of his trade, which in this case, happened to be a paint brush and a sharp, scalpel type implement.

He gently brushed away sand from the surrounding area, with such delicacy to reveal more evidence. Soon we had sectioned off an area, digging a trench around the specimen, being mindful of potentially finding something that might be connected.

While we worked on slicing back the earth around the specimen, removing it from the trench, brooding clouds on the horizon and the rising winds blustered around us, blowing sand back into our excavation: the irony wasn’t lost on us.

Excavating a specimen on the slopes of Bugin Tsav

By late afternoon, we had essentially dug out a pedestal containing the specimen, but without enough gauze and plaster of paris, we couldn’t successfully ‘jacket’ it, reducing the risk of disintegration during the extraction process.

After much deliberation, we left the site and returned to camp, deciding that it was too risky to remove it: so tomorrow, we would return; covering the surface fossils with a slurry of sand and water, before reburying it in the sand, under the protection of a bin bag.

Taking the GPS co-ordinates, next year’s expedition will have to dig it out and until then, we will not know what we found.