The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  In the 1940s, the Russians, encouraged by the Americans’ success in the Gobi in the 1920s, began their own major expeditions. A paleontologist and bestselling science fiction writer named Ivan Efremov led the crew in 1946. After visiting the Flaming Cliffs, he turned southwest toward the Chinese border. Two hundred hard miles later, his party entered a “broiling isolated depression,” Novacek wrote. The Russians had “audaciously penetrated much farther into the white-hot core of the Gobi than Andrews was in a position to attempt, places where the winds blew harder and the sun was more scorching. This was the ‘outback,’ even to nomads.” There, in the Nemegt Valley, they found what Novacek later called the “grand canyon” of fossil beds and a “wonderland of fossil vertebrates on a scale far beyond anything Andrews encountered.”

  After finding seven massive hadrosaurs in one place, the Russians named one locality of the Nemegt Formation “Dragons’ Tomb.” The skeletons turned out to be the remains of a plant-eating duckbilled dinosaur that grew up to 40 feet long and 25 feet tall and which they named Saurolophus angustirostris. They also found the remains of what are now known to have been therizinosaurs and ankylosaurs.

  Surely an apex predator fed on these dinosaurs, the Russians realized. They soon discovered a likely suspect in the form of a skull and the cervical vertebrae of a large carnivore, then hauled the fossils north in their heavy-duty military trucks, to what was then the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The carnivore’s remains were cataloged as “type specimen 555-1.” By the end of the decade, the scientists had collected at least a dozen more specimens like it, leaving some with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences.

  A Russian paleontologist named Evgeny Maleev eventually examined 555-1 in order to determine a species, and in 1955, he published his description, “Giant Carnivorous Dinosaurs of Mongolia.” The fossils represented an animal from the Tyrannosauridae family, one that appeared remarkably similar to North America’s Tyrannosaurus rex and that existed contemporaneously with T. rex, if in an altogether different place. The Mongolian dinosaur stood a bit shorter than rex, with the same disproportionately short forearms and the same lethal hind feet equipped with sharp, curved claws, but was longer by over 6 feet. Both skulls measured about 4 feet long, though the Gobi dinosaur’s head was narrower, with a slenderer snout and more teeth. The teeth continually replenished themselves, kind of like a shark’s, and, unusually, the animal could lock its jaws, a likely biological adaptation that helped the animal tear through swaths of flesh. “Everything about it suggests power and agility, an animal capable of lunging its massive body at a hapless hadrosaur and disemboweling it in an instant,” Novacek wrote. The Gobi dinosaur appeared more primitive than rex, which raised an interesting question: had the animal crossed the land bridge that once existed between Asia and North America and evolved into Tyrannosaurus rex?

  Maleev named the creature Tyrannosaurus bataar, “tyrant king hero.” The word is actually spelled baatar, but Maleev’s misspelling lived on, even if the name did not. Scientists eventually realized that sufficient differences existed between Tyrannosaurus rex and Tyrannosaurus bataar to warrant separate identities. So the first part of the name was changed to Tarbosaurus—“alarming reptile.”

  The Americans had returned to the Gobi questioning what, if anything, remained. They needed fresh finds, and in the third field season, they found them. In the summer of 1993, the joint AMNH-Mongolian expedition came upon what Mike Novacek described as a “forgotten corner of the Nemegt Valley.” Mongolians called the reddish hills Ukhaa Tolgod; the Americans thought of it as Xanadu. “In an area the size of a football field we had found a treasure trove that matched the cumulative riches of all the other famous Gobi localities combined,” Novacek wrote. Ukhaa Tolgod contained enough fossil dinosaurs, mammals, and plants to occupy scientists for generations.

  At one point, Novacek saw Norell running up, breathing hard, saying, “I found something…” They hurried to the flats and saw dinosaur skeletons “scattered across the surface,” plus “an extraordinary abundance” of eggs and egg fragments. In one broken egg, they found the “delicate bones of a tiny dinosaur that looked like an intricate Chinese carving”—the first embryonic carnivorous dinosaur on record. Another team member found a dinosaur skeleton with eggs beneath it, similar to the configuration the Andrews expedition had discovered in the 1920s at the Flaming Cliffs. The fossils appeared to vindicate Oviraptor as an egg thief, for the Nemegt assemblage showed that instead of raiding a nest, the dinosaur had been tending it. The Mongolians renewed the AMNH contract, and everyone looked forward to many years of returning for still more “clues to one of the most extraordinary cycles of life, death, and burial ever recorded.”

  The Gobi now crawled with outside scientists. The Italians were there. The Japanese and French were there. Teams routinely hired local crews of forty or fifty Mongolians, trained them in excavation techniques, and showed them how to hunt. The Germans included the commercial dealer Andreas Guhr, who arrived in 1992. The commercial allowance described in GEO alone contradicted the latest Mongolian Constitution, which in 1992 had been updated but still protected all “historical, cultural, scientific and intellectual heritages of the Mongolian people.” Somehow, deals were being made, and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

  Imagine yourself a citizen of a vibrant, very old civilization. Artifacts have been passed down in your family as important links to your personal and cultural history. Now imagine a shift in your country’s political leadership. There is but one governing political force, one supreme leader to admire, one set of rules to obey. The Party determines what possessions you may own and how much money you make. The Party demands that you maintain a “non-bourgeois” path in life; you are no longer permitted to wear your traditional ceremonial clothing or practice Buddhism. You may not study or celebrate your country’s history, such as the Mongol Empire and the life of Genghis Khan. To protect your possessions—a painted chest, a wooden bowl, a hand-made saddle, a bone-handled dagger, a blue-glass snuff bottle capped with precious red coral—you decide to send them away lest they risk being destroyed. Maybe they wind up in museums in Russia or Denmark or France. The museums of Mongolia won’t take the items because they are little more than propaganda machines. Throughout the country, there are about fifty such museums, the first of which opened in 1924, three years after Mongolia escaped Chinese rule with Russia’s help. The State Central Museum opened in 1956, consisting of two parts: natural history and history/ethnicity, the latter of course limited to what Communist leaders want the people to see.

  Then comes the democratic revolution of 1990. Museums suddenly may reimagine themselves. The two largest institutions are the National History Museum and the Natural History Museum, which now has its own location, in a stately white building that once housed a school. The collections rooms are small, with no shelving or archival boxes. The materials are stored in a jumble rather than organized by makeup or theme, some described in terms as vague as “made of soft material.” Temperature, relative humidity, and dust are not controlled. Restoration and reconstruction are almost unheard of. Important artifacts are crumbling, fading, becoming insect food. The Natural History Museum’s collection alone houses more than eight thousand items, many of them deriving from the AMNH expeditions of the 1920s, curated by the Institute of Sutras and Scripts, the original name for the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Exhibits initially consisted of photos of fossils—the fossils themselves were kept in storage—but now the real thing is on display, though it’s unclear what the specimens are.

  Each museum soon has a purchasing committee. You may now sell your family heirlooms, if you have any. The minister of culture creates new rules on conducting archaeological and paleontological research and excavation: paleontologists and state-affiliated institutions may receive government permission to collect, and the Natural History Museum may now participate in fieldwork conducted by the paleontological institute for the first time.

  The new laws also
allow antiques shops to exist. Suddenly there is a market for collectibles. There is a market for everything. If you are like most Mongolians, you look around to see what may be sold, because chances are, you and your family need money to survive. If you live in Ulaanbaatar, you probably live in housing the Soviets built. If you are a herder, you have relied upon Soviet-provided fodder structures, where livestock shelter during severe weather, and on collectives, which coordinate feed. These benefits vanish after the revolution, and at the worst possible time, as an unusually warm series of summers and droughts lure novice herders into the countryside only to be hit by the worst dzud, a particularly lethal winter storm, in decades. After tens of thousands of animals die, herders return en masse to Ulaanbaatar, already a city of too few jobs. Many settle in the poor ger districts that fringe UB, where people live without running water and burn whatever they can find for heat, including tires, which only worsens the already apocalyptic pollution. Ulaanbaatar’s rickety old coal plants, which supply much of the country’s electricity, struggle to produce enough fuel to last the winter. The Soviets have withdrawn the technicians who knew how to fix them. At one point, the U.S. embassy advises the handful of Americans living in Ulaanbaatar to “keep their passports, money, and other essentials ready” in case they need to evacuate, to survive winter in what is often called the coldest capital on earth.

  The first wave of foreign aid is incoming, including medicine and other healthcare supplies that were amassed for the Gulf War, but the penicillin, anesthetics, and iodine will soon run out. “Imagine in the 1930s in the United States, during the depths of the depression, trying to create North Dakota as a separate country. That’s what the Mongolians were facing,” one ambassador writes. When the fledgling economy hits an awful new low, experts compare Mongolia’s suffering to the Great Depression but “almost twice as severe.” Every Mongolian may buy “lesser assets of the state” like “cars, small shops, and livestock” with government-issued vouchers, some of which can be exchanged for shares in the corporations that are being carved out of large state enterprises; those shares can then be traded on Mongolia’s new stock exchange. But what most Mongolians want is food.

  The American Museum of Natural History teams realized they would need to approach field preparation in Mongolia like a “trip to Antarctica or a distant planet.” Only 3 percent of the nation’s roads were paved. Almost no one owned cars. The rail service was limited. The planes were not great. There was no communications network to speak of. Two hotels existed in Ulaanbaatar, one where Mongolians stayed and another, the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, where everyone else stayed. The Ulaanbaatar Hotel was so “epic in scale,” one visiting American said it looked like “something out of an old copy of Soviet Life.” One reporter arrived to find that the hotel’s guests included “a BBC television crew, several print journalists, foreign diplomats, staff members of United Nations agencies, circus talent scouts, oil prospectors, an investment banker from London, a British agronomist, an American Peace Corps official, a South Korean highway engineer, a Dutch veterinarian, two English trekkers, an American promoter of outdoor-advertising signs, and hunters of both the rifle and the bow-and-arrow variety.” Despite the catastrophic economy, Mongolia’s budding tourism industry showed promise. Ten thousand tourists had visited in 1990, five hundred of them big-game hunters who spent something like $3 million, many stalking the “Marco Polo sheep” once coveted by Roy Chapman Andrews.

  Mongolia already had the means for its own survival, but wasn’t using it. The nation sat on a vast, untapped fortune in gold, copper, coal, oil, uranium, and other in-demand minerals and rare-earth elements, with little to no means of extracting, refining, and exporting it. The country’s overall natural resources were estimated—conservatively—at $750 billion. Texas companies were already there, conducting seismic surveys and looking to develop two former Soviet oil fields in the desert, Zuunbayan and Tsagaan-Els. The Zuunbayan site had operated from 1950 to 1969 before the Soviets shifted exploration to western Siberia and the Caspian Sea, leaving scads of Gobi oil just sitting there. Mongolia relied 100 percent on Russia.

  The capable handling of Mongolia’s natural resources promised to stabilize a lot of lives. More than a third of the nation’s two and a half million people still lived below the poverty line, earning roughly the equivalent of $12.15 a month. They endured food shortages and other deprivations by leaning on their social networks or by finding their bread, milk, vodka, and information on the black market. Some families were so poor that if a parent died, the surviving spouse was known to turn stepchildren out into the streets or abuse them until they fled. In Ulaanbaatar, more than three thousand children were homeless. Many lived underground in holes and tunnels that held the city’s heating system, sleeping on flattened cardboard.

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the transitioning economy, people were getting “fantastically wealthy,” with living standards approaching “those in the West.” They ate in nice restaurants, drank French wine. During spending sprees in South Korea, they bought cars and computers. The new shops of Ulaanbaatar sold microwaves and VCRs. The buying frenzy happened even as the Asian economy collapsed. The state bank would soon fail because it had loaned too much money. Security seemed a long way off. Desperate and opportunistic, people made money however they could manage it, even in the most unexpected and taboo of ways.

  It’s been said that in ancient Mongolia, if someone was dying, you gave them a little food and a little milk tea, and left them alone to get on with it. You never fussed over the corpse for fear of being infected by spirits. “Under no circumstances will [Mongolians] touch or disturb a skull or a skeleton,” Roy Chapman Andrews wrote. “As soon as a person dies the body is dragged off to a considerable distance and left to be devoured by the dogs, wolves, and birds.” In early Urga, corpses were often abandoned at a dump; a Swedish missionary living in Mongolia in 1893 wrote that “no encampment is safe from the possibility that one of the family dogs may come in dragging a human leg or arm.”

  There were bones in the Gobi, meanwhile, that correlated to no known animal. Their size suggested monsters the enormity of which no one could comprehend. According to lore, the toes of herders’ leather boots were made to curl upward to avoid jabbing the earth and antagonizing whatever lived down there. (The style also allowed riders better grasp of the stirrup.) But now Westerners were rushing into the Gobi in search of the very objects Mongolians shunned. The strangers handled the big bones of the desert carefully, like treasure, and packaged them up and took them away. Companies started capitalizing on these finds by marketing dinosaur tourism. Nomadic Expeditions, one of Mongolia’s earliest tourism companies, offered a “Dinosaurs of the Gobi” package. An Australian company ran a “Gobi Dinosaur Dig” tour. Another offered the “Dinosaur Native Land” tour, which advertised the opportunity for tourists to “dig and find your own dinosaur bones.” Another offered the “Roy Chapman Andrews Mongolia Gobi Desert Overland Expedition,” wherein tourists could pay $1,433 per person to follow Andrews’s camel tracks and ponder the question, “So what was it like for Mongolia’s first American Explorer?” Mongolia Quest would offer “Walking with Mongolian Dinosaurs.” The itineraries included all the top dinosaur discovery sites, including the Flaming Cliffs. Companies sometimes paid paleontologists to join the trips as experts, the scientists having found that a tourism sideline helped as grant competition intensified or funding got cut. Besides, tourists provided free field labor. “As long as people are interested we can train them to look for fossils in a few days,” said the Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie, who once led Nomadic’s dinosaur tours. “Some of the nicest finds are made by complete amateurs.” Packages were often advertised in partnership with the national paleontology institute. One tour guide bragged online about having organized expeditions with the AMNH’s Mike Novacek and Mark Norell.

  By the mid-1990s, the Mongolian-AMNH expedition consisted of thirty people in twelve vehicles, including a National Geograph
ic film crew. Many of the hired hands on these and other expeditions learned how to excavate and jacket—a quick study could grasp the crude mechanics within a day. The crews went and told relatives and friends about the work, and word spread of this intriguing activity in the Gobi. Paleontologists sometimes glanced up from their excavations to see a distant figure on horseback or motorcycle, watching them through binoculars.