Royal Tyrrell Museum - ...celebrating life

Journey through southern Mongolia with Dr. David Eberth and Dr. Francois Therrien of the Royal Tyrrell Museum as they explore dinosaur fossil sites in the Gobi Desert.

As part of the 2007 International Dinosaur Project, Eberth and Therrien have joined other leading scientists in a project to visit and explore known fossil locations in the Gobi Desert. This five-week expedition will allow Dr. Eberth and Dr. Therrien to compare dinosaur environments and fossil preservation across the southern Gobi Desert to dinosaur sites in western Canada. A key area of research will be to understand how such different environments could yield unusually large numbers of well-preserved dinosaur skeletons, eggs, and bones.

Joining the Royal Tyrrell Museum team is Dr. Darla Zelenitsky from the University of Calgary. As an expert on dinosaur eggs and nests, Zelenitsky will work closely with Therrien to study the origins and preservation of the Mongolian egg nesting sites, and then compare them to those at Devil’s Coulee in southern Alberta.

To discover more about this expedition, visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum website often as Eberth and Therrien submit regular updates and images on the progress of their research. Also, feel free to submit questions or comments to the team about the project until September 16 by emailing tyrrell.media@gov.ab.ca.

It is with sadness that we had to leave Khermeen Tsav. How could it be otherwise? The scenery is magnificent and the fossils are plentiful.

The light of each sunrise and sunset would turn the cliffs surrounding our camp bright orange, like the flames of a camp fire.

Here’s a photo for Tom Lipka: François is excavating a small bird nest. With this site, we won the award for “Closest fossil site to camp” (less than 100m, see camp in background).

But all good things must come to an end and we began our journey back to Ulaan Baatar on the morning of September 16. But that wouldn’t be the end of our adventure as with our 1000-km journey we had to travel through the Gobi Desert, mountain ranges, and steppes… often on uncharted and unpaved roads!

There are 2 certainties when traveling through the Gobi Desert: 1) you will see a lot of camels, and 2) you will have a lot of flat tires. Whereas in Alberta we see cows on the side of the road, in the Gobi Desert you see camels (for the 2-3 times we saw cows, it was so unusual that someone always pointed them out).

In the Gobi Desert, one must be careful at camel crossings!

The roads in the Gobi consist of tire tracks across the rock-covered ground. During our long days of driving, which usually began around 8:30am and ended around 10:30pm, we often had to stop to replace flat tires.

Flat tires happen often and at anytime, day or night.

We estimate that throughout the entire expedition, in which a fleet of 6 vehicles traveled over 2500 km, 1 vehicle of the fleet had a flat tire every 100 km! Flat tires are so common that the mechanics’ and drivers’ morning ritual, after breakfast and before getting on the road, is to patch the flat tires that we had the day before.

The crew is patching the flat tires that we had the day before while looking for a way to cross the mountains seen in the background.

Fuel shortage is also a harsh reality in the Gobi Desert. Gas stations are rare and far apart (often more than 100 km apart), so we had to plan our route as a function of the amount of gas we had in reserve and the towns that have gas stations according to the road maps.

A small town built at the base of a mountain and close to a dune field. An ideal location for a gas station.

Unfortunately, we can’t predict if fuel will be available at those gas stations: we once arrived at a small town only to discover that the only gas station in town was out of gas!

A sad sight : gas station out of fuel in the desert!

We had to drive 100 km on empty gas tanks in order to reach the next gas station… and managed to make it! We eventually arrived in Ulaan Baatar on the evening of September 18… but not without having to leave 2 crew members in the field 63 km from our final destination to watch over one of our vehicles that had broken down and wait for parts to arrive the next day (Thank you Mohro and DVD!). After 3 full days of driving, we were ready to rest… but had to get up the next morning at 4:30am in order to catch our 6:30am flight back home. From our departure from Ulaan Baatar until our arrival in Calgary, our trip took 23.5 hours and took us through Beijing and San Francisco. What a trip!

Khermeen Tsav has turned out to be the Promised Land. One of those places that all of us were eager to get to and explore. Although we have been here only 5 work days we have found baby theropod dinosaurs, non-avian dinosaur and bird nests in place, evidence for paleoenvironmental and climate changes in the late Cretaceous, and some great macrofossils including a Tarbosaurus jaw, and the skeleton of an ankylosaur that a previous Russian expedition left behind, probably because it was too large. I have been able to straighten out some of the stratigraphic problems that have bedevilled us all for years, and Phil Currie has been able to do some exploring of the region using Khermeen Tsav as a base camp.

80 million year old desert dune deposits that indicate a shift to an arid paleoclimate. I particularly like their “candystripe” like pattern and color.

On the second day we got hit by another brief sand and rain storm. But, within one-half hours the sun was out and a double rainbow lit up our camp in the distance, showing Namsoo and me the way back to our camp.

I have spent long days hiking 10-12 km/day, making my way through the deep blood red canyons. They are spectacular but tough to navigate! I keep wishing we had brought dirt bikes or ATV’s…especially when you have to hike 10 km to start your work day in 30+ C heat.

Our camp in the red canyon lands of Khermeen Tsav.

Time is short here. We are already making preparations to head back to Ulaan Baatar, a 1000 km trip! Our water is running low and, horror of horrors we have run out of beer. Definitely time to leave!

A desert denizen warming up in the morning. This lizard is about 30 cm long…and can deliver quite a bite!

After several days of strenuous driving, which took us approximately 1000km across the Gobi Desert, our first few days at Khermeen Tsav have been heavenly. The scenery at Khermeen Tsav is breath-taking, with tall cliffs of red sandstone reminiscent of castle walls. The white color of fossil bones and eggshell here contrasts strongly against the red colored rocks, which makes it easier to find fossils.

Khermeen Tsav – The beautiful outcrops of Khermeen Tsav consist of tall red cliffs of sandstone.

In the first afternoon of looking for fossils alone, our group has found the partial skeleton of a small “protoceratopsian,” many isolated bones, and half-a-dozen isolated, small theropod eggs!

Salma’s egg – Salma holds a small Gobipteryx egg that she collected. This egg was laid either by a bird or a small meat-eating dinosaur.

Funny anecdote about Khermeen Tsav: we have visited an old camp site occupied by a Russian-Mongolian paleontological expedition in the 1970s, a camp site that Ligden Barsbold, our Mongolian host and son of Mongolian paleontologist Rinchen Barsbold, remembers staying at when he visited his father in the field when he was 11 years old! Speak of déjà vu...

Good dinosaur bones have been relatively hard to find so far, but Khermeen Tsav has revealed itself to be a haven for dinosaur nests: 4 nests, 1 from a herbivorous ornithopod and 3 nests from parrot-like oviraptorid, have been found in 2 days! Even better, one of the oviraptorid eggs even contains the bones of an unborn embryo!

Ovi eggs – Two oviraptorid eggs from the nest. The egg on the left preserves the bones of a small embryo.

Darla and I are thrilled by the discovery of those nests and will be excavating them over the next few days, as well as studying the habitats in which the dinosaurs built their nests. Do not fear, we will keep our eyes wide open for new fossils and nests as we proceed.

Oviraptor nest – Darla (right), Yoshi (middle), and Saya Darga (left) are thrilled to work on an oviraptorid nest.

But the paleontologists are not the only ones to be happy in Khermeen Tsav; Dave is thrilled with what the rocks have to say. He has been walking through the extensive badlands, nearly 10km a day, and has discovered the secret story of the rocks. By looking at the big pattern and tiny details of the rocks, Dave has reconstructed the landscape in which the dinosaurs lived, a complex arrangement of rivers and dunes. Dave is trying to measure as many rock outcrops as possible in the last 3 days we will spend in Khermeen Tsav in order to document his model. Needless to say that he will be working overtime.

Tomorrow, members of the crew will try to reach outcrops farther west in the Gobi Desert in order to see if fossils can be found over there. Although the outcrops are only located 50km away as birds fly, they will have to drive around a large dune field to avoid getting stuck, which will lengthen their trip to 80 km…a distance that will probably taken them 2.5 hours to cover. Let’s hope they find abundant fossils to make the perilous journey worthwhile.

We finally finished up the sauropod on September 4, and then the next day (Wednesday, the 5th) hauled the 50 blocks of fossils collected from Shine Us Khudag to a Korean mining company camp, 40 km to the southeast. The company has graciously agreed to store the fossils for us, allowing us to move west without having to make a side trip back to Ulaan Baatar to drop off fossils.

Group photo just before departing Shine Us Khudag.

We eventually managed to get on the road by 3:00 pm to start our 750 km journey to the western Gobi to explore latest Cretaceous dinosaurs and environments. However, continued vehicle problems – especially with the GAZ 66 (one of our two Russian army trucks) -- keep slowing us down. The rebuilt engine is still not working right, and because the Gobi is no place to leave anyone stranded, we travel as a group, nursing the vehicle along as it heats up and/or loses compression. Although the rough dirt trails are jarring (picture the worst Albertan oil-well access road), and our frequent stops are frustrating and tedious, the breathtaking scenery makes up for our tortoise-like travel pace. Everyone’s spirits remain high, though, especially after our great discoveries at Shine Us Khudag. Because of our late start, however, we managed to put only 40 km behind us before darkness and hazardous road conditions forced us to camp.

Our second day was equally slow. We made it as far as Mandahk (another 50 km), where, after raiding the local store for junk food and cooling off using the public water well, the scientific team settled into a restful day of reading and reviewing future plans.

The crew loading up on junk food at Mandakh.

In startling contrast, our Mongolian support crew had had enough of the GAZ 66, and matter-of-factly transplanted a used engine from a local GAZ. The engine is on loan to us, and will have to be returned to its owner after the expedition! Total time for the engine transplant: 6 hours. And once again, the entire operation was conducted outside! We were back on the road by 10:00 pm and then drove into the surrounding volcanic hills to camp for the night.

Day three on the road was marginally better. Our team got separated on two sides of a small mountain and each group decided to wait for the other before moving ahead. Although it cost us two hours of precious daylight, we still managed to log 300 km, reaching Dalanzadgad – a “large city” of ~20,000 people in the southern Gobi -- by 11:30 pm. After having a cold supper, we retired to a Ger hotel. Our total travel distance for three days: 400 km!

Gers are traditional nomadic dwellings that are common in the Gobi. They look like a cross between a tepee and a house: circular structure with camel hair felt walls tied onto a wooden lattice sub-structure with a hinged and colorfully painted door that faces south. The roof slopes from the center outward (like a grain bin) and there is a hole in the center of the roof for a stove exhaust and ventilation. Gers typically sleep four-to-six individuals, and are amazingly comfortable, spacious, and warm. The Ger hotel that we stayed at also had hot showers: the crew was in heaven!

Tsaoman, our cook, in a ger at Dalanzadgad.

The next day (Sept 8th – day 4 on the road) was marred with two vehicle breakdowns requiring our Hyundai Starex to return to Dalanzadgad for repair (new shocks all around), while the trucks (the ZIL and GAZ) went ahead, making as much time as they could. The rest of us waited on the Hyundai for four hours 20 km outside of town. By 4:00 pm the Hyndai had returned, and we were all on the road again. We drove hard until 11:30 pm, only stopping after exhaustion and the constant pounding from the ladderbacks on the dirt trails had drained everyone. Still, we managed to make progress covering 170 km.

Sept 9th – day five on the road -- we were up at dawn and managed to make more progress, covering about 160 kilometers through the bottom lands in the east-west trending Nemegt Valley (pronounce the “g”) -- including a wonderful stop at a group of 15-20 m high barchan dunes in the middle of the desert, and an hour long stop at Naran Bulag (Sunny Spring) to cool ourselves down.

A barchan dune on route to Khermeen Tsav.

The natural spring water from Naran Bulag is famous throughout the southern Gobi for its wonderful taste…of course just about any cool water tastes great after a day of driving. Everyone drank their fill and then washed up! By nightfall we were only 25 kilometers away from our goal: Khermeen Tsav. We plan to reach these fantastic late Cretaceous fossil beds by mid-day tomorrow.

Our sixth day (Sept. 10) on the road was not without its share of difficulties. Although the scientific team arrived at Khermeen Tsav by 10:30, the ZIL truck carrying our water and gasoline blew a headgasket and, once again, the incredible Mongolian support crew replaced the head gasket in the desert!

After prospecting for a few hours (finding some very cool fossils – see François’ next entry) and setting up our camp, the crew retired by 11:00.

The past few days have been sources of excitement and stress. Our departure date for the western Gobi had been delayed by the sauropod excavation, which was taking longer than expected. In addition, we found an ankylosaur bonebed a few days at the Bayn Shire type locality, where at least 4 skulls discovered, which required us to divide our crew into 2 teams: one to excavate the sauropod and the other to excavate the ankylosaurs.

In order to reach the ankylosaur bonebed, we had to drive 2 hours over 70km of bumpy dirt roads… which at their best are reminiscent of driving in construction zones (imagine Highway 9 between Carbon and Horseshoe Canyon in the Drumheller area). But we finally managed to complete the excavation of the sauropod and ankylosaur bonebed today, which means that we can now prepare to leave for the western Gobi.

Excavating a long-necked sauropod strains your patience as well as your back muscles! Because sauropods are in excess of 20m long, this means that they had a lot of bones in their body… resulting in many blocks of rock encased in plaster jackets, big and small, to be loaded in the truck.

Darla and jacket – Some of the plaster jackets can easily be carried by a single person.

Sauropod jackets – 30 blocks containing sauropod bones, now encased in a protective plaster jacket, await loading in the truck.

Some of those blocks are huge, reaching 2m in length and weighing half a ton, and required the entire crew to come together just to move them!

Loading the sauropod – The entire crew had to get together to move the largest sauropod plaster jacket.

After 1.5 hours, all 30 blocks had been loaded into the truck and were on their way to a nearby mining company which had accepted to store them while we pursue our trip to the western Gobi. Thank goodness, for otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough room in the truck for the fossils that we will find in the western Gobi!

All 30 plaster jackets have been loaded in the truck. There isn’t much room left for anything else.

Mission accomplished – Dave (left), Darla (right), and Michael (back) rejoice after the sauropod jackets have been loaded in the truck.

We will be breaking down camp tomorrow morning and will begin the 3-day, 1000-km-long drive to our destination in the western Gobi, Khermeen Tsav. This locality is legendary for both the abundance and quality of the dinosaur fossils found there… as well as for dinosaur nests! We will probably be out of internet contact during our trip, but we will take many pictures to document our trek across the Gobi Desert.

It has been been extremely hectic the last few days. Our original plan was to stay at Shine Us Khudag until we had collected the sauropod and then leave for the Western Gobi on the 28th of August. But, working in Central Asia has always been unpredictable, and the nature of paleontological work is such that one simply can’t predict what successes or failures will befall an expedition. In our case, we have hit the scientific jackpot, while encountering our fair share of bad luck with vehicles and making a friend or two in the desert.

Hedgehog camp mascot, keeps appearing at night rustling up insects

Three days ago, while returning from Ulaan Baatar with supplies, one of our two trucks was mired in a mud pit and, in the attempt to extract the vehicle, its camshaft was broken. Parts had to be retrieved from UB. Ligden, Martin and Bagee drove all day and night to get them - a 20 hour round-trip excursion. This morning I was amazed when I came around the corner of the communal tent to find Ulji, Jaga, and Darja, disassembling the engine in the open desert. As I write, the camshaft is installed and they are working through the night to reassemble the engine -- before we get hit with another sandstorm!

Uldji, Darja and Jaga rebuilding the truck engine in the desert

Martin Kundrat has now left us, and our colleagues and old friends, Phil Currie, Michael Ryan, and Eva Koppelhus, have joined us for the Western Gobi leg of the expedition. The camp is full, and navigating the tent city can be tricky at night without a flashlight!

The sauropod has taken seven days longer to excavate than expected (causing some stress for our Korean leader, Yuong-Nam). But the specimen is a beauty, and Octavio Mateus who is a Portuguese expert on sauropods, is pretty excited about describing it. My stratigraphic work places the specimen at the top of Bayn Shire Formation, and if Octavio and Yoshi are correct, this will be a new titanosauriform from Asia, different from the few specimens previously described from the region.

The sauropod quarry is getting smaller but the specimens are beautiful

Darla and Francois have been working on some exciting dinosaur discoveries of their own, just below the base of the Bayn Shire Formation (but Francois will write about those in his next weblog), while Octavio and others have been collecting skulls of an ankylosaur, possibly Talarurus, from a locality 42 kilometers from camp. My latest discovery is the first airfall volcanic ash in the Upper Cretaceous of Eastern Mongolia. By having the sample analyzed, we hope to get a maximum age for the Bayn Shire Formation. This will help to better constrain the age of its dinosaur fauna and the paleoclimatic patterns we are seeing here. Scientific excitement in running high and we are all discussing possible manuscripts from our discoveries so far, making for great evening discussions.

Although the Mongolian crew has their hands full fixing vehicles and taking care of us, they too find time to pursue other interests, keeping camp life interesting for all of us. Today, Minar and Muho arrived back in camp with two wild sheep that they had just shot. After Minar skinned the animals in front of the kitchen tent, our cooks, Anghe and Tsaoma, gutted, butchered and smoked the meat using slow-burning dried camel dung. Never a dull moment at Shine Us Khudag!

Tsaoma smoking freshly killed wild sheep using dried camel dung

Three days ago, we went to the Bayn Shire type locality, the outcrops that represent the reference or standard for the rock formation in which we work. Although the locality is only 50 km away, traveling across the desert, where dry stream beds and dune fields trapped our vehicles 3 times, turned our trip into a 3.5 hour ordeal… one way! But the trip was worth it: Dave gained a better understanding of the rocks, the group found many fossils (including a bonebed that doubled the number of animal species we knew from rocks of the Bayn Shire Formation), and Darla and I found what we had been looking for: dinosaur nests!!! One of the nests, either from a duckbilled dinosaur or from a long-necked sauropod, had been previously excavated by paleontologists in 1996 but the second nest, that of a small theropod, had never been discovered before.

The egg of a small meat-eating dinosaur, a troodontid, is exposed at the surface.

Only 1 egg was visible at the surface but we soon discovered that several more eggs were preserved in the rock. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to collect the nest (a process that would have taken several days), but we studied the rocks that encased the nest in order to better understand the habitat in which the small theropod nested and to compare it with the nesting habitats of closely related dinosaurs from Alberta.

Are the rocks giving Dave a headache? Not a chance!
Dave is putting his “thinking cap” on to makes sense of the complex geological history of the region.

Today, Darla and I accompanied Dave to the Black Mountain/Khara Khutul locality. While Dave was studying the rocks, Darla and I started looking for fossils. Within minutes, we had found the strange, large rounded teeth of a sauropod, foretelling that more fossils could be found. We wouldn’t have to search for very long as we found the remains of a baby dinosaur on the other side of the same hill! Based on the size of the bones, we know that the baby was larger than the dinosaur embryos found at Devil’s Coulee near Warner, Alberta, when it died (30 cm long). Our fossil hunt was only beginning for, only 50m away on a different butte, we found the remains of another baby dinosaur, nearly identical to the first one!!! We couldn’t believe that, in the same morning, we had found 2 baby dinosaurs.

Darla Zelenitsky and our Mongolian driver Baki are thrilled to be collecting baby dinosaur bones

We collected all the bones we could find and then had to leave to meet with Dave who had left us to go measure the thickness of the rocks. Unfortunately, by that time, we had been driving with the car fuel gauge on empty for quite some time and the prospect of running out of gas in the middle of the Gobi Desert was not appealing to any of us. Rather than going back to the fossil locality and risking having to walk 16km back to camp, we opted to drive back to camp right away. Upon arriving at the camp, we learned that we only had enough gas left to drive another 4 km... that was a close call! We were expecting fuel delivery tonight but have just learned that delivery won’t be happening. This may delay our return to that fabulous baby dinosaur locality.

We have our hands full with one of our new discoveries. The “new” dinosaur we collected a number of days ago may already have been described by a group of Americans in 2006, but, if so (and we won’t really know until we get our specimens prepared), they seem to have assigned the specimen to the wrong formation and age – a problem that happens in Central Asia all too frequently. We have been steadily working on the problem over the past few days by visiting other localities in the region and making sure that our interpretations are solid. Each excursion involves a back pounding drive across the Gobi and the use of two vehicles in the event that one breaks down. Two days ago we visited a famous locality 45 km from camp called Bayn Shire. Three and one-half hours later, and after pushing one of the vans out of the sand three times, we arrived.

The crew and our second vehicle pulling the other vehicle out of a sand mire.

We had an opportunity to examine the area only for three hours before we had to start back. Although it sounds like a lot of effort for a short amount of work, it was well worth it. Darla and Francois found two dinosaur nests, each with different kinds of dinosaur eggs and aggeshell, Octavio found a bonebed with skull elements from a small hadrosaur, and Yoshi found a “micro site” with remains of at least 10 different kinds of small vertebrates, including crocodile, pterosaur, fish, theropod dinosaurs, ankylosaur, and hadrosaur.

Yoshi and Octavio mapping the sauropod skeleton prior to jacketing the bones.

The area was particularly exciting for me because it is the stratotype of the Bayn Shire Formation – the formation we are working in here. The stratotype section is used to compare with other nearby rocks thought to be from that same formation. Here, we were able to confirm that our “new” dinosaur is from above the Bayan Shire formation not below it. Thus, it is younger than anyone previously thought, probably by about 30 million years!

The crew at Black Mountain...so named because of the basalt that caps the hill. We hope to get a
radiometric age from the basalt that will help settle the question of how old these rocks and fossils really are.

Today, however, was even better. Twelve kilometres from camp we found the base of the Bayn Shire Formation and collected volcanic rocks that we can use to radiometrically determine the maximum age of our new dinosaur, as well as all of the other finds made so far. We are now planning a research paper that will straighten out this and other age-related problems that have plagued researchers working with these rocks and fossils since exploration began here almost 100 years ago…not bad for 10 days work!

The last few days we had a Korean film crew and a dignitary from one of the Korean organizations that is helping to fund this expedition (Hwaseong City). We were filmed and interviewed while conducting our work close to camp. The film crew was easy to work with and it was reminiscent of our media activities at home in Alberta – complete with requests to “please say that again.” All in all the Koreans have proven to be great visitors, and fit in well. After sharing their dried seaweed (a delightful treat!), Kimchee (spicy cabbage in tomato sauce), soju and vodka with the Mongolian crew and the rest of us, we were all sad to see them go this morning (except for grad student Yosuke, who was a bit hung over).

Camp life has settled into a rhythm. We rise with the sun, wash up, eat, and head out by about 8:00 am, returning to camp by 12 for lunch (if we are working in the area). In the afternoon we put in another five hours, arriving back at camp between 6:30 and 7:00 pm. We wash up again (after having a beer) and sit down to a communal supper, sharing our discoveries and observations for the day. After supper, evenings are spent cataloguing specimens, photographs and GPS data sets, and writing field notes….and writing this weblog. Talk to you soon.

Now that the backhoe removed most of the overburden at the sauropod quarry, work is progressing rapidly. Already the upper arm bone (humerus), the thigh bone (femur), the shin bone (tibia), several ribs and many vertebrae have been exposed and the specimen promises to be of good quality.

Sauropod quarry1 - The sauropod quarry is full of surprises:
here is the complete upper arm bone (humerus) of the giant dinosaur.

The bones are scattered around in a sandstone unit but show a preferential orientation NNE-SSW, indicative that they were transported and oriented by something... but what exactly? The 2 sedimentologists in our crew, Nam-Soo from Korea and the Royal Tyrrell Museum's very own Dave Eberth share different opinions over what oriented and buried the bones the way they are: Nam-Soo believes that evidence for the influence of wind are preserved in the rocks while Dave believes that flowing rivers are responsible for moving and burying the bones of the large sauropod. A long discussion between the two ensued where each party presented arguments for and against each idea in front of an attentive audience. In the end, both parties decided to agree to disagree, although the majority of the audience believes that the rivers won over the wind.

Dave Eberth and Nam-Soo talking about the rivers and the wind.

Two days ago, Dave Eberth went prospecting in a section of badlands characterized by red colours that we all thought (including Dave) was barren of fossils. To his great surprise, Dave found fossils in those red beds approximately 4.5 km from the camp. After a long discussion after dinner, it was determined that the bones were that of a small dinosaur, remains of which are unknown in this portion of the badlands characterized by white rocks where our camp is established. Darla, myself, and 3 colleagues spent yesterday afternoon looking for fossils in those redbeds but came back with very few and disappointing fragments.

Darla redbeds - Darla Zelenitsky, unafraid of the height, walks
on a high ridge in the badlands in the middle of the red beds.

Believing that Dave had just been lucky on his expedition to the redbeds, we were shocked to hear him say that he had walked by a dinosaur leg while studying the rocks but had not bothered collecting it because he believed that the 5 of us would have found much better specimens!!! So today Dave took me to the site where he had found the fossil dinosaur leg the day before and, as we returned to the car, found another specimen right next to the car tire! We had nearly driven over what is only the second articulated specimen known from those redbeds!!! This afternoon, I led a crew to the newly discovered fossils and we collected them before anything bad happens to them. Dave may be a sedimentologist, but he has a very good eye for fossils....

Dinosaur hand - The clawed hand of a dinosaur was
discovered in the redbeds that we once believe were devoid of fossils.

Tomorrow, we are heading out to Bayn Shire approximately 45 km away, the reference locality for the fossiliferous rocks were are working on. Dave hopes that this trip will clarify issues about the rocks we have around here while the rest of us hope that we will find more fossils.

After "surviving" our first sand storm, the Gobi Desert returned to a state of calm like we hadn't seen before: there was not a hint of wind last night and we slept with our tent doors wide open. All day today we were treated with a bright blue sky and, had it not been for the occasional light breeze, it could easily have been an excessively hot day.

Early this morning, Dave went to complete his study of the rocks in order to understand the environments that prevailed here during the time of dinosaurs while Darla and I took our colleagues Yoshi, Yosuke, Octavio, and Martin to the locality where we had found many interesting fossils, including the partial upper jaw of a small crocodile. We spent 1-2 hours looking for fossils and showed them the locality where Dave had found earlier this week fossil seeds preserved in the rock. Subsequently, Darla and I accompanied Yosuke to his excavation site while the others returned to work at the sauropod quarry.

Dave's fruit - Dave displays proudly the "fruit" of his labor: a fossil seed resembling a jalapeno pepper.

Darla at sauropod quarry - Darla and Octavio excavate the rib of a sauropod during the sandstorm.

A few days ago, Yosuke came across bones that turned out to be the remains of a large ankylosaur and he had been excavating it on his own with hand tools ever since. He was quite pleased to see that 6 new people and a jack hammer had come to help with the dig. In the process, we exposed more of the animal and discovered that bones of the hip, back, rib cage, and possibly even hindlimbs are preserved! It will be a massive endeavor to extract the fossil but, fortunately, we have learned that a nearby mining enterprise will be loaning us a backhoe to help with the excavation of the sauropod and ankylosaur. What a relief...

Tonight, the calm weather persists but we can see extensive cloud cover over the horizon. We just hope that another storm is not heading our way...

Troup - The group takes shelter inside the back of a truck to have dinner during the sandstorm. From left to right: Darla, Octavio, Martin, Yoshi, Dave, Nam-Soo, Song, Haya, and Yuong-Nam.

Camel - In Mongolia, the remains of unlucky camels are found next to the remains of dinosaurs that died millions of years before them.

Yesterday and last night we experienced our first sandstorm. To get an idea of what a Gobi sandstorm is like, imagine being in a convertible car being towed by a dump truck full of sand and cruising down the highway at 90-100 km an hour…now, stand up in the convertible! The storm lasted for twenty-four hours. Tents that weren’t filled with centimetres of sand were flattened, our camp storage tent was flattened, sand invaded every possible opening of our field gear, and at least two cameras that hadn’t been stored in Ziploc’s were destroyed. Lunch, supper and breakfast were ‘crunchy.’ François, Darla and I made it through OK by bracing the insides of our tents with our luggage. It was tough to sleep though, with the tent rustling all night long.

By midnight, the wind had changed direction and was coming in from the north…from the arctic. We awoke to a chaotic camp, and a cool temperature of 5°C that made it unpleasant to wash the sand off. But, the Gobi is nothing if it is not a place of extremes, and by 11:00 am the day had turned beautiful … no wind and warm temperatures in the mid teens. We were all back in full swing by mid-day. For now, though, the Mongolian crew, whose tents were almost all flattened, will have to sleep in the dining/work tent. This was one of the few structures that survived due to the quick thinking of Ligden Barsbold, our camp manager. During the storm he had all the trucks lined up in front of the tent saving it from the harshest gusts.

Some of the crew has been working on excavating a large sauropod dinosaur – even in the sandstorm. The quarry keeps getting bigger as more and more bones are found. It’s now about the size of one car garage. This morning, Ligden Barsbold drove to Saynshand trying to locate a backhoe or bulldozer that could help us out by speeding up the excavation. There is a lot of mining in the area and it would be great if we can snag some heavy equipment to open up the site as fully as possible. Even though we are using two jackhammers its still a slow backbreaking job. Our time at this locality (Shine Us Khudag) will be short (five more days) and, given that no sauropod has ever been described from this area of Mongolia, we are eager to get the specimen out by whatever means are available over the next few days. If we can’t get it completely excavated over the next few days, then it will have to await another season…a risky proposition given the amount of illegal fossil collecting that has occurred in Mongolia in the past few years.

At another locality Youske is excavating the pelvis of an ankylosaur…it’s a big specimen too, and will definitely take him the rest of the time we have available.

Tonight everyone went to bed early…a result of fighting the sandstorm yesterday. More about the fauna and climate studies over the next few days. Stay tuned…

The next morning we struggled to put together a breakfast amongst the chaos of unloading trucks, and then headed out to prospect, allowing our Mongolian support crew to set up the base camp. Yoshi Kobayashi, our Japanese colleague, had visited this locality with Ligden Barsbold (the senior Mongolian team member) in two previous years, and took the time to show us the location of a few dinosaur sites of interest including a sauropod skeleton (still buried) and a bonebed of ornithopods.

Although it was a beautiful morning after a day of rain, we spent the morning of the 20th at the Visa office getting extensions for the international members of the team. Accordingly, we got on the road at 11 am. With trucks having left the day before and Francois and Darla awaiting news about their missing baggage, half of the team was loaded in three vehicles and driving to the south southeast, heading to Saynshand, a town of about one thousand people located 430 km south-southeast of UB. At Saynshand the plan was to meet up with our two trucks and drive another 100 km west farther into the desert to Shine Us Khudag, our first fossil locality. Francois and Darla will join us tomorrow night.

For the first 210 km we drove on concrete pavement, making good time. By mid afternoon, however, the pavement was behind us, and we were driving on the gravel and sandy trails that are famous throughout Mongolia. Nonetheless the drive was beautiful; characterized by endless panaromas of grassy plains and very low relief mountains in the far distance. The landscape is very sparsely populated with the traditional nomadic dwellings (gers) made of felt from camel hair, and small herds of goats The few towns we passed were sites of coal mining in the Lower Cretaceous strata. The absence of trees, made wholly difficult to tell distances. In one instance, as the TransSiberian train
passed in the distance, it looked tiny and almost toy-like.

After fixing a valve stem on one of our tires, tying down the gear on the roof of another, and crawling across dusty desert trails at an average speed of 50 km/hour, we eventually arrived in Saynshand at 7:30 pm. Supper consisted of raman-style noodles eaten at the roadside as we waited to meet up with our two trucks. After getting more tires fixed, we headed out into the dark.

Driving across the Gobi at night was truly fantastic. With no urban lights to obliterate the stars,.our way was lit by the setting moon as well as Jupiter and Mars hanging over the western sky. Using high powered flashlights we found the Bayn Shiren Formation field area, and a suitable area at which to camp by 11:00 pm. We set up our tents and, finally, got to sleep by midnight.

After a total travel time of 24 hours, we are now in Ulaan Bataar (UB), the capital of Mongolia. We are staying at the Bayangol Hotel and have met up with many other members of the international team as we all begin the task of getting organized for tomorrow’s departure to the Gobi Desert. This city of one million people contains 1/3 the population of the country and is growing rapidly as it continues to attract more tourists. The many westerners seen on the streets come to hike and tour the rugged, but beautiful, Mongolian landscape. Retired boomers, students, and even families from Europe and North America are a common sight, as are the Russian-made vans and more modern SUV’s that are operated by the numerous tour companies who are constantly ferrying small tour groups into and out of the mountains around UB.

Ulaan Bataar is small enough that it is fun to explore on foot. Even though its drab architectural legacy is obviously rooted in the country’s past association with the Soviet Union, there are many fine restaurants specializing in cuisines from around the world (including Mongolian), and countless small stores in which cultural knick knacks can be ‘discovered.’ Although I’m not much on shopping, today’s find was a small outfitters store close to the hotel that carries topographic maps that will compliment the satellite data we are carrying.

Tomorrow morning (Monday, the 20th) we will have to visit the Ministry of Immigration to obtain visa extensions, and then most of us will leave in a convoy of five vehicles, heading SSE to Sayn Shand, in the Eastern Gobi Desert. I haven’t been to Sayn Shand before, but I am familiar with its dinosaur discoveries that include Early and Late Cretaceous hadrosaurs, theropods, and sauropods, as well as eggs and nesting sites. Unfortunately, my colleagues François Therrien and Darla Zelenitsky, from Alberta, will remain behind in Ulaan Bataar for at least one day to see if Air China successfully forwards their luggage from Beijing, our last connection point. After collecting their bags (or replacing their gear, which may be required if the luggage has been lost) they will meet up with us at our camp outside of Sayn Shand. My first order of business after we set up camp will be to make sure that the satellite transmission equipment is working so we can stay in touch with all of you.

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