The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  The museum announced the Central Asiatic Expeditions as a scientific endeavor focusing on the origins of ancient man. Asia magazine and the American Asiatic Association pledged their support, with a unified goal of making a “contribution of large value to the development of the scientific knowledge of the world, an instrument of further establishing friendly relations between China and the United States and an important factor for increasing the interest of the people of the United States in the people and affairs of the Orient.”

  China controlled border access to Mongolia, but Andrews thought of a way to win over the government. In exchange for being allowed in the Gobi, the Americans would teach the Chinese how to explore, and give their scientists cast copies of whatever fossils they found, to start a natural history museum. The project promised to forge “friendly relations” and make discoveries “destined to increase the prestige of the United States in the world of science.”

  The expedition made its headquarters 400 miles south of the Mongolian border in a compound within the high walls of the Forbidden City palace complex. “Soon it became a small city in itself, devoted to the multiple interests of the Expedition,” Andrews wrote. “There were the living quarters of my own family, garages for eight cars, stables, a house for the storage of equipment, an office, laboratories, and a complete motion-picture studio.” The arrangement required complex negotiations, including bribes—what Andrews called “squeeze.” He wrote, “There is almost unending bargaining: Middlemen with their ‘squeeze,’ the police with their squeeze, all the squeezes of the contractor, the squeezes of those in control of the water, the electric light, and the telephone, and dozens of others, until one feels as though one had been squeezed to death.” Andrews redid the 161 rooms of his rental into 40 larger ones, and kept at least 20 servants, including a head butler. “It is a delightful Aladdin’s Lamp sort of existence,” he wrote. “You say what you want and things happen. It is best not to inquire how they are to be done.”

  In March 1922, seventy-five camels filed through the Great Wall, each carrying nearly 400 pounds of supplies. Seven cars followed in late April, the men dressed in khakis and riding boots and wide-brimmed felt hats. Summiting the pass that led to the Mongolian plateau felt like reaching “the roof of the world.”

  The team’s maps were barely maps, inked with little more than dotted lines and other markings that indicated caravan routes, oases, and mountains where often there turned out to be none. Descending the rocky plateau, they entered the grasslands. The grass thinned out and coarsened. Camel sage studded the plains. Badlands appeared. “Red hills and buttes showed prominently against the skyline,” Andrews wrote. “It was ideal country in which to search for fossils…”

  On day four he was relaxing at his tent when two cars arrived in camp. Out jumped Walter Granger, the expedition’s chief paleontologist. “I knew that something unusual had happened because no one said a word,” Andrews wrote. “Granger’s eyes were shining and he was puffing violently on his pipe. Silently he dug into his pockets and produced a handful of bone fragments.” Granger told Andrews, “Well, Roy, we’ve done it. The stuff is here.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE FLAMING CLIFFS

  THE “STUFF” WASN’T HUMAN. BUT IT WAS PREHISTORIC REMAINS. One afternoon at the end of the first field season, the expedition stopped near a couple of gers to ask directions. Shackleford, the photographer, walked a few hundred yards out to look at a strange formation. He soon stood at the edge of what Andrews later described as “one of the most picturesque spots that I have ever seen,” overlooking a “vast pink basin, studded with giant buttes like strange beasts, carved from sandstone.” Mongolians called the area Bayanzag, but the Americans decided to name it the Flaming Cliffs, because “when seen in early morning or late afternoon sunlight it seemed to be a mass of glowing fire,” Andrews wrote. The sight wasn’t unlike that of the western badlands recorded in 1800s America, for “there appeared to be medieval castles with spires and turrets, brick-red in the evening light, colossal gateways, walls, and ramparts.”

  Shackleford descended the slope, planning a brief search. Then, “almost as though led by an invisible hand he walked straight to a small pinnacle of rock on the top of which rested a white fossil bone,” Andrews wrote. The sandstone had weathered away, leaving balanced there a skull—“obviously reptilian” but unlike anything any of them had ever seen, with horns, a parrot-like nose and mouth, and a frill like an Elizabethan fan collar. Granger would name the dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi.

  The party made camp and spent the rest of the day searching the ravines and gorges, finding bone after bone glowing in the red sandstone. Granger came across what appeared to be part of a fossil eggshell, which everyone assumed to belong to a bird, though the stratigraphy told them the locality dated to the Cretaceous. The site begged intensive study, but all they had time to do before hurrying back to Peking, to beat the winter, was mark the eggshell’s location and plan to investigate the following year.

  In the off season Andrews wrote about the expedition for a wide audience, but just as often he was the story subject, pictured kitted out with his revolver or Mannlicher rifle and cartridge belt. In public lectures, he captivated listeners with tales of bandits, killer dogs, flash floods, and Gobi sandstorms ferocious enough to strip a camp to its tent spikes and rip the clothes off a man’s back. There would be an amusing incident involving accidentally shooting himself in the leg, and a terrifying one about the night venomous snakes slithered into camp as everyone slept: lighting their lamps, the men found vipers coiled around cot posts and nesting in boots for warmth. One expedition member later suggested that Andrews’s love of adventure sometimes led him to embellish: “Water that was up to our ankles was always up to Roy’s neck.” His field journals gave “the clear impression that what primarily motivated him was not the advancement of science or the discovery of fossils but a lifelong yearning for adventure and remote, dangerous country,” Smithsonian later wrote. “In his heart he was an explorer first and a scientist second.” The New Yorker noted, “Mr. Andrews is at bottom that ancient type, the hero of the chase, the Nimrod. All his life he has been a hunter and collector, and what he is doing now is simply a glorified version of what he did as a boy, when he roamed the woods around Beloit, Wisconsin.”

  If Andrews was the storyteller, Granger was the story. The son of a Civil War veteran and lifelong roamer of the Green Mountains of Vermont, he was six years younger than Andrews and had joined the museum at seventeen as an assistant taxidermist. He had never gone to university and would not hold a degree until 1932, when, at age sixty, he was awarded an honorary one by Middlebury College in Vermont. Andrews got the glory, but Granger got the bones. “I hope you know that it was Walter Granger and not Roy Andrews who was primarily responsible for almost all the American Museum’s paleontological discoveries in Asia,” George Gaylord Simpson wrote to the Polish paleontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska in 1970, soon after she published Hunting for Dinosaurs, about her own groundbreaking Gobi expeditions. “I knew them both very well, and have always regretted that Granger’s modesty and Andrews’s egotism led to a misunderstanding of their accomplishments.” As Vincent Morgan and Spencer Lucas put it in a biography project on Granger written for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, “Granger represented science, Andrews represented saga, and it was science that was important.” Granger was the one “universally held in esteem as the man who reconstructed the evolutionary sequence of the North American horse, the man who helped initiate the search for Peking man, the man who discovered the fossil rich Bone Cabin quarry in Wyoming,” Morgan and Lucas wrote. While Andrews handled the Gobi logistics, Granger oversaw the paleontology, often coaxing bones from near dust. “At Granger’s core lay the master craftsman,” Morgan and Lucas wrote. In his field notebooks Granger cited each fossil’s physical position in situ, its stratigraphic location, its relationship to other fossils; and the circumstances of the discovery, making
the Central Asiatic Expeditions one of the best-documented projects in the annals of science.

  One day, Granger cracked open a concretion and at first thought he was looking at the skull of a tiny dinosaur. Later, in the lab, the skull was found to be that of a mammal. Since the late 1800s, a major evolutionary question had involved the origin of placental mammals (mice, humans, manatees) as opposed to marsupials (koalas, opossums, kangaroos). Placentals were far more successful in number and distribution—their species lived around the world, while marsupials lived mostly in Australia and South and Central America. These Gobi remains looked placental. And they were itty-bitty. All of which was odd, because the fossils came from Cretaceous layers—which suggested that mammals evolved much earlier than scientists had thought. The museum told Granger, “Do your utmost to get some other skulls.”

  He got hundreds. Andrews described a single day in which Granger found nearly two hundred jaws and skulls of carnivores, rodents, and insectivores.

  And there were dinosaurs—enough to rival Como Bluff and then some. In addition to Protoceratops, the crew discovered Velociraptor, once described as a “lapdog-sized predator covered in feathers,” and Psittacosaurus mongoliensis, an early Triceratops ancestor that measured about 6 feet long and probably ate plants and small animals. In the first field season alone, the expedition collected nearly two thousand specimens, many of them new to science.

  The expedition returned the next summer in 1923, heading straight for the Flaming Cliffs. On the afternoon of July 13, an assistant, George Olsen, came in from hunting and said he had found fossil eggs. Walter Granger had found a shell shard a year earlier, but nothing had come of it, and now everyone scoffed that Olsen’s eggs were probably concretions. But they followed him to where he’d been searching, and sure enough, three cylindrical objects lay next to a sandstone ledge. Each measured about 8 inches long and several inches across, resembling enormous cracked potatoes or fat, stale baguettes. Others just like them were poking out of the earth.

  Until that point, no one knew how dinosaurs procreated. Did they give birth to live babies like humans? Lay eggs like turtles? No clues existed, other than some intriguing shell fragments a Catholic priest had found years earlier in the French Pyrenees. “With mounting excitement they began to brush the sand away from the ledge, exposing more of the fossils,” Preston wrote in Dinosaurs in the Attic. “Conclusive proof shortly emerged.” Remarkably, they found “the fragmentary skeleton of a tiny, toothless, unknown dinosaur” on top of the eggs.

  But what dinosaur? Over a hundred skulls and skeletons of Protoceratops, a plant eater, had been (or would be) found at the Flaming Cliffs, leading the paleontologists to deduce that the eggs were Protoceratops, too. Granger excavated the entire block and shipped it to New York, where preparators revealed thirteen eggs laid in two layers of concentric circles, the narrowest end of each egg pointing toward the center—a nest. Yet the dinosaur found on top of the eggs was a meat eater, leading Henry Osborn to conclude that it died while in the act of attacking the nest. He named the dinosaur Oviraptor, “egg thief”—a case of mistaken identity that wouldn’t be corrected for the better part of a century.

  Now that Andrews had seen what the Gobi offered, he knew he needed ten years in the field. This would require more fund-raising. It was decided that the expedition would recess in 1924 and return to the States, where he would raise the quarter of a million dollars necessary to continue the work. He would deliver the first dinosaur eggs known to science personally to the museum.

  “What are the darned things worth?” asked the baffled Shanghai agent of Lloyd’s of London when Andrews went to insure them.

  “Scientifically, they’re priceless,” Andrews told him. “Commercially, they would be worth only what someone would pay for them.”

  Andrews decided to insure the eggs for $60,000. The next question was how to secure them on the Dollar Line vessel that would carry him home. He ultimately packed the eggs in a “good, tight” suitcase, waterproofed it, and wrapped it in a homemade life jacket.

  By the time the ship docked at Victoria, British Columbia, the world knew about the eggs. Reporters clamored for exclusives. “I will give you fifteen hundred dollars for the exclusive use of the dinosaur egg photograph for a week,” a Seattle Post-Intelligencer representative told Andrews. Another offered three grand. A San Francisco paper upped it to five. “I was aghast,” Andrews wrote. “From the foreign correspondents in Peking we knew that the dinosaur eggs had ‘caught hold’ all over the world but expected nothing like that.”

  In New York, Andrews received a hero’s welcome. Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, invited him to lunch. John D. Rockefeller Jr. attended his welcome-home reception and pledged one million dollars for the American Museum’s endowment. A sketch of Andrews’s hangdog face ran on the cover of Time. Newspaper executives bid for his writing, with William Randolph Hearst alone offering a quarter of a million dollars for a Roy Chapman Andrews exclusive. Standard Oil pledged twenty thousand gallons of gas, five hundred gallons of oil, and candles for the next round of field research.

  By Thanksgiving weekend, the Mongolian dinosaur eggs were on display at the American Museum of Natural History, drawing hordes of visitors. Thousands of people jammed into Andrews’s public lectures, where he “spread the gospel” about the museum’s fieldwork while barely mentioning science. Hiring the same agent as Will Rogers, he gave more than a hundred talks in one four-month period, ending the tour looking and feeling like “a sucked orange.” As he and Yvette walked down Fifth Avenue one night, Yvette pointed out the neon R.C.A. sign, whose letters stood for Radio Corporation of America, and said, “That’s you.”

  Publishing book after book, Andrews galvanized the public imagination with stories that attempted to put readers, including children, directly into his experiences. Where the eager public saw heroics, critics came to see exploitation. Expeditions rarely bothered to credit local participants by name. As Andrews tried to raise money he pointed out that New Yorkers had funded the first round of research and that he hoped the rest of the country would kick in for the next phase, an “all-American expedition made up entirely of Americans and carrying the American flag, American ideals, and American inventions into a part of the world of the utmost importance to scientific progress.” In truth, the expedition had included nine Mongolian assistants, a representative of the Mongolian government, and nine Chinese assistants—hardly an “all-American” venture. “Imperial objectives were an integral part of the expeditions,” the science historian Ronald Rainger wrote in the 2004 book An Agenda for Antiquity. “For them, Asia was fertile ground for economic development and exploitation. Projects such as the Central Asiatic expeditions not only followed up the openings made by political and economic expansion but embodied the same attitudes and objectives.” Critics saw traces of theater in the iconic photos of Andrews in the Gobi in his dust-coated boots, wearing a “ranger hat, complete with a feather.” These were the ways Americans, “especially white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans,” made their presence known “throughout the world,” Rainger noted, observing that it was no accident that Andrews titled one of his most important books The New Conquest of Central Asia. The title “embodied the sense of priority, superiority, and the right to take control of knowledge that characterized these expeditions.”

  At the time, though, Andrews was as famous as the celebrities who courted him as a friend.

  The Gobi fieldwork of 1922 and 1923 had produced what Andrews’s boss, Henry Osborn, saw as a “paleontological Garden of Eden.” Andrews still hoped to find evidence of early mankind in Mongolia, but for now relished the attention he received from having opened the world’s greatest known fossil field. The museum had nine tons of Gobi fossils to work on, including seventy Protoceratops skulls, plus thousands of specimens of modern creatures.

  Yet all anyone could talk about were the eggs. The actor John Barrymore, a prolific collector of oddities, begged Andrews for one.
Osborn said the eggs did “more than anything else in the whole history of paleontology to make the ‘man on the street’ dinosaur-conscious.”

  The eggs were so popular, Andrews decided to sell one.

  The “grand publicity stunt” of an auction would help the museum raise fast money and allow the public to feel intimately involved in exploration. “They believe this is only a rich man’s show,” Andrews told Osborn. If people knew that even small contributions helped, they would give. “Every news story could explain that we’ve got to have money or quit work.”

  “Roy, it’s a great idea—a ten strike,” Osborn reportedly told him. “Let’s do it.”

  Andrews had forty reporters in his office by that afternoon. The American Museum of Natural History as a policy did not sell its discoveries, but Andrews explained that marketing a Mongolian dinosaur egg would ensure future expeditions. “We have got a perfectly good ‘corner’ on dinosaur eggs and I cannot possibly conceive of the ‘corner’ ever being broken,” he told the press. “While a good many dinosaur bones and skeletons have been found in the Western part of the United States and in other parts of the world, the museum’s explorers are the only ones to uncover the petrified eggs of the ancestral reptile. We have felt there is no good reason why we should not sell one of these eggs.” After all, the museum had twenty-five of them. “The majority are in excellent condition,” he said. “There is no desire on our part to make any money for the museum, but only to help defray the expenses of the Asiatic expedition, which will start out again next summer.” A New York Times headline on January 8, 1924, read, “Dinosaur Egg 100,000,000 Years Old for Sale; Museum Asks Bids to Aid Explorers’ Fund.”