In 2008, the year she finished her PhD, Bolor accepted a postdoc position with Horner and founded an NGO called the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, hoping to address some of the concerns she and her new mentor shared. She wanted to build a state-of-the-art dinosaur museum in Mongolia, use her Western education to help the next generation of Mongolian paleontologists, and fight poaching. First, though, she and a Museum of the Rockies colleague developed a Museum in a Box outreach program for Mongolian schoolchildren, wherein Bolor traveled the Gobi with “discovery trunks” teaching the importance of fossils.
Usually, when Mongolian paleontologists finished their education, they went to work for the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, but Bolor didn’t want to do that. The institution seemed to care little about public outreach and education. The second time she met Barsbold, she told him about her NGO hoping they could collaborate, but the very idea seemed to agitate him. She would remember him saying, “You have to take ‘dinosaur’ out of your name,” and “You just doing this for business, to make a benefit for yourself.”
Bolor believed her achievements sufficient to have earned the respect of her Mongolian and American colleagues, but her résumé, which included grants from Harvard, Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology, and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, appeared to impress them little, if at all. Because she worked on mammals, they saw her as unqualified to call herself a dinosaur expert, and they disliked that she tried to circumvent the Mongolian Academy of Sciences to do whatever she wanted. Bolor knew she couldn’t look to AMNH scientists for backup because, though they had trained her, they couldn’t align themselves with her for fear of alienating the Academy, which granted permissions to work in the Gobi. Bolor had encountered Mongolians who told her they had heard negative gossip about her from other paleontologists, stuff like, “She married an American—she is not even Mongolian anymore.”
Bolor had spent most of her adult life in the United States and had married an American, but in fact she wasn’t a U.S. citizen. To become naturalized, she’d have had to renounce her home country—Mongolia, ever mindful of its location between Russia and China, doesn’t allow dual citizenship. Bolor had never planned to stay in the United States in the first place. She loved certain parts of America—the national parks, Utah, Wyoming—but they weren’t home. The in-betweenness was the expatriate’s affliction. “If we leave, people think we’ve abandoned our country, but it’s the opposite,” she once said. “We’re more patriotic—because we’re trying to make change.”
Bolor had started her NGO not to disavow the Mongolian paleontological community but rather to improve it by making her own contributions within a system where she otherwise saw no opportunity for herself. Horner urged her to find a way to work with her Mongolian peers, but Bolor couldn’t get past the idea that the paleontological center operated “like a service company” for foreign scientists: “Expedition comes. Provide the cars, go out with them. If they find something, stick their name on the paper.” It irritated her that Mongolian paleontologists seemed to expect little of the foreign scientists and institutions that had made their names largely on Gobi fossils. “The whole country’s heritage is being handled by just a handful of people,” she said. “I am trying to break that thing.”
Also, she wanted the bones back. It bothered her that many Mongolian fossils, including type specimens, often weren’t returned by the outside paleontologists who had borrowed them for study. Thousands of fossils were still in collections in the United States, Russia, Japan, and elsewhere. Whenever she argued aloud that the bones should come home, including those collected by Roy Chapman Andrews in the 1920s, some of her peers worried that she sounded nationalistic. Even those with no stake in the debate gently questioned her reasoning. Given Mongolia’s poor museum conditions and entrenched concerns about government corruption, wouldn’t the fossils be safer and more accessible in a place like the American Museum of Natural History?
Bolor decided that if she couldn’t bring back the bones, she could at least try to protect the fossils that were still in the field, and that the best way to do it was through a public figure. She wrote to various politicians, with no luck. Then, in the spring of 2011, as the market was flooded with Mongolian fossils, she heard that Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, a popular author and activist, would be in Chicago giving a speech.
Oyuna had attended university in Russia and graduate school at Stanford, on a Fulbright scholarship, and she had spent time at Yale on a fellowship. Now in her late forties, she spoke to women’s rights audiences at home and abroad. Youthful and slim, she wore tasteful suits, small earrings, a strand of small pearls, and dark red or plum lipstick that complemented her sleek black hair. One of her editors once described her as a woman who carried “her well-earned success lightly, and with much charm.” An aide once watched Oyuna amicably settle a bureaucratic dispute and said, “Now I understand what politicians are supposed to do.” Bolor showed up at her Chicago event to say, “Sister Oyuna, please mobilize politicians to do something about Mongolian fossils.”
Oyuna’s areas of expertise involved water quality, law enforcement, and electing women to public office. Like most Mongolians, she had never given one thought to dinosaurs. Bolor pressed her: Mongolia sacrifices too much to outside paleontologists and to poachers. “We are losing our heritage without even knowing what we have.”
Bolor struck Oyuna as a passionate science advocate who wanted to raise awareness but lacked the standing to do it. “Give me something to read,” Oyuna told her. “Give me something to learn.” Bolor assembled a packet of news articles and books, and gave Oyuna one year to read them and to publish a “nice article” on the importance of Mongolian fossils.
Oyuna’s already full to-do list suddenly included reading Dragon Hunter, the Gallenkamp biography of Andrews; The Fossil Dealers, by Australian paleontologist John Long, a former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology; Tyrannosaurus Sue, by Steve Fiffer, about the Black Hills case; and Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur, about the late-1800s bone wars between Marsh and Cope. Reading about Andrews, Oyuna became fascinated. Reading Dealers, she became alarmed. In news articles she noticed that critics often blamed Mongolia for not taking action on “our stolen materials.”
A year later it came time to write her “nice article.” Oyuna knew that as a non-scientist, she couldn’t write like a paleontologist. Nor was she comfortable writing as a politician, “preaching others what to do.” So she decided to write her newspaper article from the point of view of the dinosaurs in Mongolia’s natural history museum.
She chose as her lead narrator Tarbosaurus bataar, the fiercest creature ever to inhabit Mongolia, other than Genghis Khan. “Dinosaur’s Dream” began: “For some time, I’ve been talking to the dinosaurs of the Mongolian Gobi in my heart.” The dinosaur was bothered that the Natural History Museum’s plaques were written in a way that “only a paleontology student can understand.” The dinosaur eggs dreamed of not being poached: “Please, dear Mongolians, stop stealing eggs and selling us to foreigners.” Mongolia’s “fighting pair” spoke up to say, “We need a law that prohibits people from taking us out of Mongolia”—if foreign scientists were banned from borrowing fossils, they would be forced to conduct their research in Mongolia, bringing Mongolia acclaim. It wasn’t fair that “American, Canadian, and Chinese scientists are doing research on our dinosaurs and becoming stars in famous science magazines.”
Oyuna wrote her article for Ardchilal, a newspaper founded in the early 1990s by her boss, President Elbegdorj. It was published on May 17, 2012, to coincide, Oyuna later said, with International Museum Day. At one point the T. bataar character said, “The truth is, I’m not a star yet, but I do know that I have all the potential to be a star.”
That potential was already on display in New York City: Oyuna’s article appeared as the Heritage auction opened for previews.
“Dinosaurs!” Oyuna said when Bolor beseeched her to do something about th
e T. bataar sale. She was through with dinosaurs!
But Oyuna took the matter to President Elbegdorj. “You’re talking to me about dinosaurs?” he asked when she called him that morning. “I didn’t appoint you science adviser.”
“This dinosaur is getting sold and somebody needs to complain,” she told him. “Could you please just give me half an hour?”
Oyuna was soon in the president’s office, spreading out the dinosaur books and articles Bolor had assigned her as homework. “Boss, I’m not a paleontologist, but I read all of this stuff,” she told Elbegdorj. She then showed him images from the Heritage catalog and said, “This dinosaur is Mongolian. Please claim it for Mongolia.”
But what can we do? Elbegdorj asked. When Oyuna explained temporary restraining orders, Elbegdorj asked, “What if we lose?” Oyuna told him, “If we lose, you’re still going to be the first president who tried to claim Mongolian property. If we win, you will be the first president to ever bring Mongolian property back. Nobody has ever claimed Mongolian properties from international auctions or sales before.”
An “urgent appeal” then posted to Elbegdorj’s presidential website: “President of Mongolia Is Concerned That T-Rex Skeleton May Belong to Mongolia.” The species was inaccurate and the release credited Mongolia’s education minister, not Oyuna, with alerting Elbegdorj, but the point was made. Mongolia wanted to know who was selling the dinosaur and how the seller or sellers had acquired it. News outlets were picking up the story. David Herskowitz told Live Science the dinosaur had entered the United States legally and that its consigners warranted in writing that they “held the title to the fossils.” He said, “No one knows where exactly it was dug up. They’d have to find the hole and match up the matrix,” which any paleontologist could tell you is impossible.
Heritage’s history defense, meanwhile, was that laws didn’t apply because the dinosaur’s existence predated them, a stance that was deemed absurd. “That’s like saying the Saudis aren’t entitled to their oil,” said Oyuna’s husband.
Once President Elbegdorj agreed to pursue a legal remedy, Oyuna worked on hiring a lawyer. In Houston, Texas, Robert Painter was on the verge of leaving for a work trip to Singapore when he stopped to check his messages one last time.
CHAPTER 16
THE PRESIDENT’S PREDICAMENT
PEOPLE HEARD ABOUT PRESIDENT ELBEGDORJ’S NEW LAWYER and thought, Whoa, what? How does a Texas attorney in a small family firm wind up representing the leader of Mongolia? To understand it, you had to go back to even before the first days of the democratic revolution.
The eighth son of a herder, Tsakhia Elbegdorj came from Khovd, a province of lakes and valleys in the far southwest, on the Chinese border, at the foot of the Altai Mountains. Born in 1963, he “proudly” wore the distinctive red kerchief of a Communist Young Pioneer as a child. When he was sixteen, his family moved way up north, to Erdenet, a city four hours south of the Russian border and 250 miles northwest of Ulaanbaatar. Erdenet had recently been built to tap the world’s fourth-largest copper deposit. After high school, Elbegdorj went to work in the mine as a machinist, joining a labor force of some eight thousand people, many of whom commuted from Russia. A year later, in 1982, he was drafted into the military, where his leadership of a Revolutionary Youth Army unit and his fondness for submitting poetry to the army newspaper led the government to suggest that he study military journalism in Lviv, Ukraine.
In Lviv, Elbegdorj listened closely to Gorbachev’s speeches about change, and later exulted at the televised sight of President Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” After college, Elbegdorj moved to Ulaanbaatar to work for an army newspaper, Ulaan Od, “Red Star.” By 1989, he was thinking about starting Mongolia’s first independent newspaper and advocating for democratic reforms alongside other young revolutionaries, calling perestroika a “timely and brave step.” Mongolia had quietly become the first Eastern bloc satellite to break away.
Elbegdorj was a compact, soft-spoken young man with wavy hair and a full face and, later, eyeglasses. He married his college sweetheart, Bolormaa Khajidsuren, who at one point studied at business school in Roanoke, Virginia. They would have four sons together and adopt a daughter from an orphanage, as Elbegdorj was poised to start Ardchilal and to claim a seat in parliament as a member of the nation’s newly formed Democratic Party.
A total of six Americans lived in Ulaanbaatar as Mongolia prepared for its first multiparty elections in late July 1990. Ambassador Joseph Lake and his wife became numbers seven and eight, discovering “this incredible clicking between Mongolians and Americans.” Mongolians were the nicest people Lake said he had ever worked with, and the country was one of the few Soviet satellites that had “truly progressed” under Communism. “My perspective was that if the Mongolian people voted for a democratic process we could influence the process of change in Mongolia,” he said. The United States suddenly had the chance to influence the course of events at a time when Mongolia’s leaders were looking for help, a deputy secretary of state, Desaix Anderson, had told the House Foreign Affairs Committee several years earlier, as the United States and Mongolia established diplomatic ties. A push for free elections and economic freedoms in Mongolia was a sandbag against the spread of authoritarianism.
Independent observers declared the first multiparty election fair and democratic. The Democrats grabbed a handful of seats in parliament and slowly gathered strength. The prospect of a positive, violence-free transition to democracy appeared so promising, Secretary of State James Baker visited Mongolia with a tantalizing offer: the United States would serve as Mongolia’s “third neighbor,” helping the country broaden its contacts and influences beyond Russia and China. When Mongolia drafted a new constitution in 1992, Americans were among the outsiders invited to participate. “Mongolians seem remarkably free of false pride,” one participant told The New Yorker. “Did you ever hear of a country asking foreigners to help draw up its constitution?”
Among the consultants were twenty-three Christians from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They already happened to be in Ulaanbaatar, having “adopted” Mongolia at the urging of Dr. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. As part of Bright’s mission to “teach Christianity to everyone on the planet by the year 2000,” the South Dakotans had traveled to UB to show the film Jesus. Then, as now, the capital was a small town kind of city—people mysteriously seem to know your business almost before you do. It didn’t take long for men in uniform to show up at the South Dakotans’ hotel and ask what they were doing in Mongolia. Jesus sent us, said one of the South Dakotans. When government leaders heard this, they supposedly said, in a line almost certainly too good to be true, “Well, do you think this Jesus could help us write our constitution?” And so it was that one of the South Dakotans helped write the religious freedoms passage. Other sections were “lifted verbatim from the election law manual of Texas” and the U.S. Constitution. The Mongolian constitution’s preamble began, “We, the people…”
The South Dakotans met a parliament member named B. Batbayar, who, during college in Poland, had lived with a missionary from Milwaukee. Batbayar thought Mongolia needed an independent TV news station, to counter state programming, and offered the South Dakotans the opportunity to start it. “His motive was to bring free and objective news coverage to the nation, believing that without a free press their young democracy would collapse,” one of the South Dakotans later explained. As Batbayar secured a broadcast license for channel 8, Eagle TV, the South Dakotans founded the AMONG Foundation, a nonprofit based in Sioux Falls, to oversee the project. AMONG would provide a newsroom, studio, equipment, and staff, introducing CNN and other American programming like The Waltons and Touched by an Angel. The foundation’s stated mission was to “further a better understanding of the democratic form of government, promote and foster the free market system and the values upon which the democratic society is built;” but, to be clear, AMONG was also there to proselytize. One employee
later said the foundation helped write a constitution “guaranteeing religious freedom in the most Buddhist nation on earth,” as if the ancient faith were some intractable scourge.
It was hard to know precisely who else was behind Eagle TV or the rest of the media, for that matter. Then, as now, Mongolian laws made it almost impossible to know the names of the owners and players, or to understand their intentions. Many outlets were said to be owned by politicians or political actors who used the media as a secret extension of their public agenda. Bribes—“squeeze,” as Roy Chapman Andrews put it in the 1920s—were “epidemic across the media spectrum,” one Eagle TV station manager, an American, later wrote. “Bribery was almost cultural.” It was known that AMONG owned half of Eagle TV, while the other half was owned by an entity identified only as the Mongolian Media Corporation; together they comprised the Mongolian Broadcast Company. The individual Mongolian owners were generally identified only as “Democrats,” but some press reports mentioned founders by name, including Elbegdorj. Eagle TV went on the air on September 28, 1995, less than a year ahead of the pivotal parliamentary elections of the summer of 1996, where the Democrats hoped to unseat the Communist Party for the first time.
Now that Mongolia was a burgeoning democracy and had declared itself a nuclear weapons–free zone, President George H. W. Bush authorized financial aid, which zoomed from zero to $30 million. Secretary of State Baker had already returned to Mongolia to build on his third-neighbor offer: a concept initially seen as “a rhetorical gesture” was now codified into foreign policy and law. Baker, a former Houston lawyer who served as the Reagan White House’s chief of staff, worked with the International Republican Institute, and now the IRI began working in Mongolia. In the days leading up to the crucial elections of June 1996, they used an unlikely strategy, deploying Congressman Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” as a model. Two years earlier, the Georgia Republican’s national campaign blueprint for a “conservative revolution” had triggered a GOP sweep in the House of Representatives, resulting in the first majority since 1952. The IRI now offered to teach Mongolian party leaders how to forge coalitions, draft position papers, gauge popular opinion, and mount campaigns. The Democrats, the only party to accept the American Republicans’ consulting offer, adopted a “Contract with the Mongolian Voter.” Drafted in part by Elbegdorj, the platform called for cutting taxes and social services, and privatizing most of state property. A herder with fifty cows and sheep told the Washington Post, “I read the Contract with the Voter closely. Everybody did.”
The Dinosaur Artist Page 22